Hasdrubal's Tale

Chapter One

“It feels like a storm,” Void said. “Doesn’t it?”

I nodded, stiffly, as I stood at the gates and peered towards the distant mansion. My uncle’s message had been surprisingly urgent, for a man who so lazy there were whispered suggestions he’d married a pregnant women. It was cruel of us to laugh, I suppose, but Uncle Mago of House Barca was the man who constantly dangled the promise of family acceptance in front of us, if we did one last thing — and then a second last thing — for him. The family regarded us as deniable assets. I wondered, sometimes, if they thought they were fooling anyone.

“The wards are clearly going haywire,” I agreed. Hamilcar and Himilco — our other brothers — were walking the edge of the grounds, prodding the defences to look for weak points we could use to break into the mansion. “And there’s wild magic spilling everywhere.”

Void glanced at me. “Do you think they’re betting there’s enough wild magic in this place to kill us?”

“I hope not,” I said. There were no birds flying through the air, no small animals scurrying through the brambles. That wasn’t a good sign. Animals tended to be smarter than humans where wild magic was involved. “I really do.”

I felt my heart sink as my eyes ran over the grounds and the distant mansion. It would have looked good in its time, I was sure, but now it was a wreck. The wild magic animated the flower beds and distant bushes, turning them into ravenous entities that were clearly on the verge of uprooting themselves and setting out to wreak havoc on the countryside; the mansion itself was drenched in magic, the wards slowly decaying into a haze of magic that might easily destroy the mansion. They had to be taken down, Uncle Mago had said, before the entire structure collapsed into rubble. Personally, I suspected he was renting us out to the White Council and its Mediators. I’d checked the records, such as they were, and House Barca didn’t seem to have any interests in the region.

Unless our father is involved, somehow, I thought. We didn’t remember the bastard who’d sired us, then left us to the family’s tender mercies. We’d spent long nights using spells to try and track him down, although we didn’t know if we wanted to hug or hit him, only to draw a complete blank. Is this one of his labs?

Hamilcar and Himilco returned, wands in hand. “No weak points,” Hamilcar said. He was our wardcrafting expert, although we were all pretty good. Our tutors had wondered if we were taking each other’s exams at school, on the grounds our unique nature made it difficult for anticheating charms to work. “We’ll have to go through the gates.”

“There’ll be something nasty on the path,” Void cautioned. “We’ll have to be careful.”

I nodded as we inched to the gates, our magic fusing together into a single unit, as if we were a single person with multiple bodies. I wondered, sometimes, if it was that that scared the family. We were an unstoppable team. We’d fought duels in which we’d been heavily outnumbered and still emerged victorious, simply because we worked together so well. If we’d taken on the might of the family… we moved as one, knocking the gates open and running up the path. It was deceptively still until we were halfway to the mansion, where upon the ground shifted underneath us and Hamilcar and Himilco fell into a pit. We reacted at once — as one — casting spells to levitate the fallers out of the pit while the others hopped over and landed neatly on the far side. The ground shifted, trying to hurl us into the pit again, but we kept moving. There were charms woven into the wards to keep us from flying — a simple precaution, even in those days — but they weren’t designed to keep us from levitating. We pin-wheeled over the path and landed safely, staffs raised in anticipation of a second threat. The ground heaved, the bushes tearing themselves from their beds and hurtling towards us like monsters from the Blighted Lands. I thought I heard them scream as we blasted them with fire and wind spells, the former setting them ablaze while the latter hurled the burning branches against the far wall. The damage to the garden didn’t matter. There was so much wild magic in the air that it would have to be torn down, the ground cleansed before the garden was regrown from scratch.

Void laughed. “I think we’re not welcome.”

I heard my brothers chuckle as we pressed through the inner wards. The owner — dead now, according to our uncle — had been paranoid, incredibly so. His wards were a virtual spider web of traps, each countered spell triggering another. Freeze spells tried to stop us in our tracks, change spells tried to turn us into toads, levitation spells tried to send us flying over the wards… we countered them all, covering each other perfectly. I saw a fireball shoot at Void’s back and deflected it into a change spell coming at me; he caught a paralysis spell aimed at me and shot it at a stone statue, which stopped dead and then shattered into a thousand pieces of debris. I hoped the statues hadn’t been human once, before they’d trespassed in a sorcerer’s domain. If they were, the spells had lasted so long they’d become permanent.

The door loomed up in front of us, brimming with spells. I threw myself forward, drawing the spells onto my wards and deflecting them into the air. A wave of focused magic descended on me, threatening to crush my strongest protections. It would have been suicide, if my brothers hadn’t been at my side. I took the hit, starving death off long enough for them to undo the defences and tear the spells to pieces. The doors crashed open. I stumbled forward, blinking hard as we swept into the lobby. Silence fell, like a physical blow. I looked around warily. The lobby was disturbingly still, brightly lit even though there was no visible light source. I didn’t like it.

“Interesting,” Void said. “The charms felt as if they were directed by a living mind.”

Hamilcar scowled. “The sorcerer is dead, remember?”

“Is that true?” Void kept turning his head from side to side, as if he expected to be attacked at any moment. “Did you see the body?”

“That fat oaf wouldn’t dare to lie to us,” Himilco muttered. “The sorcerer is dead. His wards are lingering. That’s all there is to it.”

I wasn’t so sure. The lobby was… weird. It looked like a normal aristocratic lobby, with a marble floor and marble stairs and marble statues and paintings — edged by marble, of course — and yet, there was a faint sense we were being watched pervading the air. It felt as if something was waiting to happen. I reached out with my senses, tracing the magic running through the mansion. The files insisted the mansion had originally been built by the magicless aristocracy and then been sold to the owner, but I had my doubts. The building was perfectly tuned for magic, allowing it to be turned into a warded stronghold with very little effort. It was odd.

Perhaps they thought there’d be a magician in the family, sooner or later, I thought. Or maybe something else is going on.

My eyes narrowed. Uncle Mago was too lazy to lie and yet, it was quite possible someone had lied to him. Had we been sent on a suicide run? We were powerful, and as a team we’d bested magicians far greater than ourselves, but there were a handful of sorcerers who were practically one-man armies. They could fight necromancers in single combat and win. There weren’t many of them, but…

“If he did lie to us, we’d boil him alive until his blubber ran like water,” Hamilcar said. None of us particularly liked our uncle — he smiled too much, concealing his distaste for us behind a mask he was too lazy to maintain — but Hamilcar loathed him. I knew why, although I was forbidden to tell. “He wouldn’t dare.”

“We have to find the wardstone,” I told them, flatly. There was no point in hanging around the lobby. The wardstone would be at the heart of the building. “Let’s go.”

The sense we were being watched grew stronger as we inched across the lobby, following the threats of magic as they led us down the corridor. The marble décor never changed. Long rows of portraits glared from the walls, their eyes seeming to follow us as we walked past them. I wondered, idly, if they were the sorcerer’s ancestors or if he’d just inherited them from the previous owners. There were legal precedents for fictional relationships that everyone took seriously, even though everyone also knew they simply didn’t exist. Or maybe they were just part of the defences…

Void hissed a warning as the corridor twisted. I cursed, snapping out a pair of protective spells. The trap would have caught us if we hadn’t shared a bond. The labyrinth spell was an impressive piece of work, warping the corridor into an endless circle that would hold any normal intruder prisoner until he starved to death… to us, the distortion was obvious. We reacted as one, three of us shooting more spells into the walls to keep them from twisting while Void attacked the spell directly. The entire building seemed to shake — I guessed a pocket dimension had collapsed — as the spell snapped out of existence. I was morbidly impressed. A sorcerer who’d set up a pocket dimension without a nexus point was clearly a very powerful and dangerous sorcerer indeed.

The paintings came to life a second later, ghostly figures floating towards us. I heard Hamilcar curse as a painting sliced at him with a translucent knife, a knife that proved to be real when it mattered. The sheer power involved in making the knife real, if only for a few seconds… by the gods, I hoped it meant we were dealing with the work of a dead Lone Power. All the other possibilities were worse. I threw a fireball at the ghost of a snooty aristocrat — the man was short, yet he still somehow managed to look down his nose at me — and cursed as it passed through and splashed against the far wall. Dispersal charms didn’t work either. Void stepped forward, casting a wave of fire that swept the walls and consumed the painting frames. The ghosts vanished with their paintings.

“Some people just like to be clever,” Void said. “They’d have got us if they’d just kept the paintings out of sight.”

I nodded as we hurried down the corridor, ducking, dodging or destroying the mansion’s defences. The statues came to life — again — and attacked us; powerful lights flickered and flared, voices whispering in our ears, speaking to our doubts and insecurities even as they promised us the world. We jumped into the air as the floor dropped from beneath our feet, drawing on all of our reserves to avoid a plunge into a second pit. The corridor thinned, the walls closing so sharply we had force them open… it would have been impossible, again, if we weren’t such a well-practiced team. A wave of illusions rushed towards me — my worst fears come to life — and broke against our shared will as I drew on my brothers for support. I could always rely on them. We were family.

The marble vanished, replaced by black walls glowing with eerie light. I led the way into the final chamber, darkness pulsing around me like a living thing. It was impossible to convince myself, now, that the defences were merely following orders. I could feel the threads of magic pulsing through the darkness, leading us onwards… they were connected to something, something intelligent. Did the sorcerer have a wife? A child? A partner? Perhaps even someone who’d broken into the mansion, before us, and taken control for himself? It wasn’t impossible…

… And then the darkness parted, revealing the nightmare at the heart of the mansion.

It stood in a circle, so disconcertingly human that it was hard to look at it directly. My brain refused to acknowledge its presence. It wore the form of a tall naked man, inhumanly perfect. Too perfect. It was impossible to believe it was human. It’s perfect face was so proud and haughty that it put my family in the shade. My legs wobbled as it met my eyes. It was like staring at a dragon, at a creature that knew, beyond all doubt, it was an apex predator. It was almost hypnotic. I had to bite my lips to keep from stumbling across the circle. If I broke it…

“A demon?” Void sounded astonished. We’d never seen a demon before. Technically, we weren’t supposed to know about them either. If we hadn’t been sneaking into the restricted parts of the school library since our first year, we wouldn’t have known anything. The tales of DemonMasters were so ancient it was impossible to say what had grown in the telling. “He used a demon to power his wards?”

“He was a little man with a great fear,” the demon said. Its voice, sickeningly sweet, seemed to reach my mind without going through my ears. It made my skin crawl. “And so he brought me out of the darkness to protect him.”

I stepped back, allowing Void and Hamilcar to examine the wards surrounding the circle. It looked absurdly fragile, little more than a line on the stone floor, but as long as it remained unbroken — if the restricted texts were telling the truth — the demon couldn’t escape. I forced myself to recall what I’d read about the nature of demons, about how they would take advantage of the slightest loophole to harm or even kill the fool who summoned them. They were bound never to lie, the books insisted, but that didn’t make them trustworthy. The best way to lie was to tell the truth in a manner that ensured you’d never be believed. My family was very good at it.

“You commanded the defences,” Void said, picking apart the charms. “He must have been sure he could control you.”

“He was a fool,” the demon said. It regarded us with polite interest, but I could see the malice behind its smile. No human bore that much malevolence towards anyone. “He got what he wanted.”

I saw it in a sudden flash of insight. The wards had started to collapse after the caster’s death. It was only a matter of time before the mansion collapsed too, the rubble breaking the circle and freeing the demon. The spells would release enough wild magic to feed the demon, allowing it to remain on the mortal plane long enough to do some real damage. I shuddered. The crazy madman had either planned it that way — perhaps he hated the world around him and wanted to make it pay — or he just hadn’t thought it through. I cursed him under my breath. How the hell were we supposed to stop a demon? I wasn’t sure it was even possible. A necromancer would be preferable.

The demon smirked. I shuddered. It could read my thoughts. It knew I knew what it had done. It knew there was nothing I could do about it. There was no way to banish the demon without breaking the circle and no way to break the circle without freeing it. It would be gone before we could work out a way to trap it… I cursed the dead sorcerer as I looked around, trying to find a way to reinforce the circle before it was too late. We needed specialised supplies and there were none. We hadn’t known to bring them…

Void laughed and cast a pair of spells into the ward network, taking control. “We don’t have to banish you,” he said, as he snapped orders to the rest of us. “We can use you instead.”

I saw it as we hurried to take our places. The ward network drew on the demon’s power. The sorcerer hadn’t been a complete idiot. The demon was powering the wards that were keeping it prisoner, effectively pinning itself. It had the same problem we had. It couldn’t free itself without tearing apart the wards and it couldn’t do that without falling back into the darkness. It needed the circle to come apart on its own…

“Perhaps we could make a bargain,” the demon said. I thought I heard a hint of desperation in its voice. Had we scared it? Or was it playing with us, as a cat might play with a mouse? “There is much I could offer you.”

We ignored it as we meshed our spells together, directing the ward network to draw more and more power from the demon, then consume the wild magic pervading the air. The mansion shook — I heard the sound of crumbling masonry as the spells holding the building together started to fail — but we barely noticed. We were so practiced at working together we had no trouble doing three things at once: drawing energy from the demon, channelling it into an ever-expanding spell and preparing our escape. The wards shattered — the demon screamed, a sound that burned my very soul — and we teleported out, materialising outside the mansion gates. I barely caught a glimpse of the mansion one final time before it exploded. I thought I saw the demon within the fireball, inhuman eyes burning down at me and then vanishing. The air seemed to grow lighter. The demon was gone.

“Well,” Void said, as the birds started to sing again. “We did dismantle the wards. And everything else as well.”

I couldn’t help myself. I laughed.

After a moment, the others joined me.