The Hammer and the Blade

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

They kept their eyes open for Vwynn, but saw none, saw nothing but the cursed red earth of the Wastes. After about a half-hour, they located a likely hole in the ground. The soft mound around the lip of the hole, bones and bonemeal, was spongy under their boots. Warm air emanated from the aperture, carrying with it a fetid, organic stink. Nix could hear distant rustling, a faint squeaking.

They looked west, where the sun was about to fade under the horizon. Nix held the wand in one hand, his hand axe in the other. Egil had shed his cloak and held it in one hand. The priest looked to Nix.

"We grab the first one we can, before the whole swarm gets clear," Nix said. "We change and we get the Hells clear."

"Aye, that," Egil said. "Try not to get carried off this time."

"I'll do what I can."

The priest cupped a hand to his mouth and shouted down the hole. Squeaks and intense rustling sounded from deeper down in the hole. Nix had the eerie sensation of the entire earth shifting below his feet.

"Ready, now," Nix said, tensing.

They could hear the creatures moving, shrieking, but none emerged from the hole. Egil, holding his cloak at the ready, looked over at Nix with raised eyebrows. Nix shrugged, leaned over the hole. Lots of movement somewhere below, but nothing coming up.

Suddenly the swarm burst from the earth ten paces to their left, a dark cloud of flapping wings, scales, and fanged mouths. A cacophony of their angry shrieks polluted the air. The cloud of the flock turned and wheeled toward them.

"Shite!" Nix said. "There, Egil!"

With nothing else for it, Egil and Nix ran straight toward them. Immediately Nix was swimming in an ocean of wings, shrieks, claws, and teeth. The creatures ripped clothing and flesh, tearing holes in Nix's skin, drawing blood. Nix flailed frenetically at the creatures, threw one to the ground, stomped it, struck another from before his eyes, took another by the throat and held it before him. He drew the wand and spoke a word in the Mages' Tongue. The wand warmed, the golden tip glowed, and he moved to touch the creature he held, but another of the creatures, perhaps drawn by the light, snatched the wand from his hand.

"The wand!" Nix screamed, lunging after the creature. But the weight of the creatures that clung to him proved too much and his leap turned into a stumbling fall. He crushed a few rolling on the rock, but dozens more took their place and tore at any exposed skin. He rose to all fours, trying to spot the one that had taken the wand.

Egil, covered in the creatures and bleeding all over, dove after the winged fiend bearing the wand, his cloak spread wide like a scoop. The priest enveloped the creature, hit the ground in a roll, his body crushing half a dozen of the creatures, and rose, soaked in his blood and theirs. His cloak, looped into a bag, bounced about from the movement of the creature's he'd caught.

"Here, Nix!"

Scores of the creatures swarmed them. Nix climbed to all fours, the creatures tearing at his flesh. He could barely see, so thickly they flew before his face. He stood, flailed through a fog of them.

"Keep talking!"

"Here, over here, here," Egil said.

Nix grunted against the pain, killed the creatures where he could, and kept moving. He took care only to protect his eyes. Egil met him halfway and Nix stuck his hand into the priest's makeshift bag. He felt the wand and pulled it free, taking a bite on the hand from one of the captive creatures. He touched the wand's end to one of them and, without hesitating, touched the glowing end first to Egil then to himself. When his skin started to tingle, the magic taking hold, the swarm of creatures shrieked and fled off, perhaps sensing the unfolding magic.

Bleeding, gasping, the two of them stared at one another as their human forms sloughed away and they transformed into creatures small, scaled, and winged.

Nix's vision was not normal, nor sharp-eyed like the gull's form, but was instead a field of reds, oranges, yellows, blues, and blacks, and it took him a moment to realize that he was "seeing" temperature differences. He adjusted to the new sense as best he could, shrieked at Egil, and took wing to the west. He hoped the magic would last long enough to get them to the sea of glass.

Of course, he wasn't sure what they'd do if they caught up with the sylph. They'd be stuck in the form of the scaled, winged creatures. Nix supposed he could annoy them to death with his shriek.

Anticipating Egil's commentary, he rebuked himself.

Damned gewgaw s, he thought.

The sylph bore Rakon and his sisters west, back over the cracked earth of the Wastes, knifing through the sky at speed. Rakon stood in the center of the sylph's swirl, supported by an invisible pillow of air.

Winds howled and gusted all around him, the sylph ecstatic in its joyous, rapid flight. Rakon, too, was exultant. He held the Horn of Alyyk in his hands. Made by Abn Thuset, a note blown from the horn was said to break the strongest of binding wards.

Perhaps Abn Thuset had intended to use it on the great ward of the Wastes, as a way to unleash the Vwynn on Afirion enemies. Perhaps the wizard-king had used it to free the creatures bound in the Wastes from time to time.

In the end, Rakon didn't know and didn't care. He only knew that, if the secret histories he'd read were correct, he could use the horn to free Abrak-Thyss and save his house.

Pressure built in his mind as they neared the center of the Wastes — his sisters' growing fear laying siege to his mental defenses. The drugs he'd given them must have been wearing off. Rusilla and Merelda had proven enormously resistant to his alchemy. Their terror gnawed at the edges of his mind, haunting his consciousness.

They floated beside him, arms and legs limp, their hair and dresses spread out gently on the invisible bed of the sylph's winds. They looked like spirits, archons descending from the Three Heavens.

He regretted the sufferings his sisters must endure, but he knew they would accept them in time, as his mother had. He'd enter into a false marriage with the more fertile of the two, and soon the Norristru line would be renewed, and his position, and that of his house, would be secure for another generation.

The sylph gusted over the Wastes, covering miles in moments. The setting sun reddened the sky to the west. Minnear would rise full soon after sunset. The Veil between worlds would thin to a wafer.

Ruins dotted the landscape below him, the gravestones of the dead civilization that no histories named. Ahead he saw the ring of ruins encircling the sea of glass. It glistened red in the setting sun, an ocean of blood.

Vwynn coated the ring of ruins like flies on a corpse, thousands of them, lurking in what shade they could find among the jagged bones of stone. They must have crept forward to occupy the ruins after the caravan had left. And yet none dared touch the glass. Yet.

They looked up, eyes glittering, and let out a collective snarl as the sylph descended onto the sea of glass. The winds of the sylph faded and Rakon put his feet down on the smooth surface. He felt the pressure of the Vwynn's regard like a physical thing. It was all around him, thick in the air, their anger a weight on his person.

The fear projected by his sisters grew to panic, infected him, sped his heart. The Vwynn, too, seemed to feel it. It, too, was thick in the air. Motion in the dark places in which they sheltered spoke of their agitation: growls, snarls, the scrabble of claw on stone.

"We'll need to leave immediately after freeing Abrak-Thyss," Rakon said to the sylph.

The wind whispered the sylph's agreement.

Rusilla's voice sounded in his head, penetrating his defense, a desperate plea from far off. Don't… Rakon.

He turned to look down on Rusilla. Tears leaked from the corners of her wide eyes. Her forefinger lifted, as if she were trying to point at him accusingly.

He kneeled, took her hand in his. "I must. You'll forgive me in time."

She replied with nothing but fear.

"You tried to use those tomb robbers to help you. Did you think I didn't know? They're dead now, Rusilla, killed by the eater. No one can help you now."

The tears flowed unchecked down his sister's face. Again the raised finger.

He stood, his expression hard. "You lost this chess match, sister. And now you'll do what you were born to do. Both of you."

He took the Horn of Alyyk in his hands and turned away from his sisters. The magic in the horn caused his hands to tingle. He walked toward the location on the glass where his spells had located the prison, his tread loud on the glass.

The Vwynn fell silent. The winds died completely, even the sylph overwhelmed by the moment.

As he walked, Rakon intoned a phrase of awakening in the Language of Creation. In answer, the horn vibrated in his hands.

The Vwynn moaned.

Rakon put the horn to his lips, aimed its bell at the glass surface before him, and blew. Shimmering air poured from the horn in a swirling column, the recoil pushing him back a step. The long, low note emitted into the charged air made his teeth ache. The vibratory energy struck the glass, cracked it, shattered it, and put a furrow in it deep enough for a burial. The impact threw millions of tiny glass shards into the air and they fell in a tinkling, musical rain. Scores fell on Rakon, cutting his hands, his face, his scalp. He cursed, shielded himself as best he could with his cloak.

"Sylph!" Rakon called.

"Yes, master," the sylph said, surmising his command.

The wind swirled around Rakon, formed into dozens of vortices that collected the shards and expelled them away from Rakon.

Rakon ignored the pain of his flesh wounds, ignored the warm blood dripping down his face, braced himself against the recoil, and blew another note. The magic of the horn deepened the gash in the glass. The air around him filled with more shards, filled with his sisters' fear, with the pensive terror and anger of the Vwynn. The sylph protected him from the rain of glass and he blew another note, another, digging deeper into the strata of the dead civilization, putting a deep scar on Ellerth's face. Another note, another shower of shards, and he saw what he sought, what his researches had told him he would find.

A metal cylinder lay revealed at the bottom of the gash. Engraved glyphs covered it entirely, the straight lines of the characters a script Rakon did not recognize. Staring at the characters made his head ache.

Movement in the hills around him, all around him: the Vwynn edging closer. He had to hurry.

His sisters' terror grew incoherent, a cloud of fear polluting the air of the ruins.

He stared at the cylinder, the contents within it the hope of his house. He put the horn to his lips and blew another blast. The energy slammed into the cylinder, sparking, sizzling, a shower of magical pyrotechnics that left Rakon blinking in its wake. When the note subsided and the sparks died, the prison remained sealed, but many of the glyphs were effaced. The horn was warm in his hands. He blew another note, effacing more of the glyphs in a storm of energy, another, and when the echoes of the final blast were nothing more than echoes, the cylinder lay blank.

"Abrak-Thyss," Rakon shouted in Infernal, a dialect of the Language of Creation. "Come forth! Emerge and honor the ancient pact between your house and mine."

The Vwynn watched in pensive silence.

His sisters were reduced to animal terror.

For a long moment nothing happened, but then two dots appeared on the smooth surface of the cylinder. The dots moved, leaving lines in their wake, seams, cracks in an egg that would soon birth a devil. Rakon watched it unfold with terrified fascination.

A deep, bestial roar sounded from within the cylinder, the sound as pregnant with power as had been notes from the horn.

The Vwynn moaned, snarled.

Another growl from within the cylinder quieted them, awed them perhaps. A ferocious blow from within the cylinder buckled it outward. A roar, the pent-up rage of centuries, sounded from within.

The Vwynn snarled, their terror turning to anger, their anger to action. Two or three took a reluctant step forward, breaking the border of the glass.

Rakon's sisters' terror reached a climax, momentarily catching Rakon up in its flow, then diminished altogether. Perhaps they'd fainted.

Another blow widened the cracks in the cylinder. The capsule rocked back and forth and frenetic snarls filled the air. The Vwynn echoed them.

"Emerge, Abrak-Thyss!" Rakon said.

A final, forceful blow exploded the cylinder outward. Dust and chunks of bent and broken metal flew into the air, crashed against the glass of the ground. A scaled, serpentine arm as thick as a man's leg emerged from the cylinder, gripped one of its edges. Instead of a hand, the arm ended in a fang-filled rictus. Two small black eyes above the mouth blinked in the light of the setting sun. A second hand joined it, a third, a fourth.

The bulk of Abrak-Thyss shifted within the prison that had held him for millennia. He roared, the sound like an avalanche, and heaved his thick, scaled trunk out of the confines of the cylinder.

Whatever spell or decadent beliefs had held the Vwynn at bay fell away the moment Abrak-Thyss emerged. A collective shriek, desperate and hate-filled, announced their advance. They poured wildly down from the ruins and onto the glass, coming from all sides, a savage horde of claws and teeth, loping wildly over the smooth surface, thousands strong. They tumbled and clambered over each other in their haste to reach the freed devil.

Abrak-Thyss answered their howls with a roar of his own. The fanged, lamprey-like arms attached at the broad shoulders stretched and writhed. The devil stood half-again as tall as a man, his muscular, scaled form as broad at the chest as two barrels. Where a head and neck should have been, there was instead a mouth lined with glistening yellow fangs as long as knives. Two more arms, also serpentine and fanged but somewhat smaller than the other two, jutted from the devil's abdomen just below the mouth. They flexed and twisted in sickening jerks, as if already shoveling Vwynn into the fang-lined maw.

"Sylph!" Rakon called.

The devil crouched, his great muscles churning beneath the deep green scales, and leaped out of the furrow the horn had put in the glass. He landed near Rakon, the force of his impact veining the glass with tiny cracks. He roared again, his outer arms whipping around, regarding Rakon, the advancing horde of Vwynn. The gaze of one of the arms stopped when it fixed on the prone forms of his sisters.

"Yes, Abrak-Thyss," Rakon said, sensing the devil's lust. "They are yours, offered in honor of the pact between House Thyss and House Norristru. Your blood requires you to honor that pact."

The devil growled low in answer. Ichor dripped from the lamprey mouths at the end of his arms. One set of eyes darted around, following the movement of the Vwynn as they stormed across the glass. The other set stayed fixed on Rusilla and Merelda.

"Sylph!" Rakon called again.

The winds swirled around man and devil and sisters. The sylph's high-pitched voice rang out of the gusts.

"Master?"

"Remove us from here, and take us back to the manse."

"Yes, master."

The devil whirled on Rakon, the eyes of both arms glaring at him. When he spoke from his central mouth, his voice sounded like the coarse grinding of boulders.

"No. Stay. Kill. Feed."

Rakon held his ground in the shadow of the devil. "No, Abrak-Thyss. I freed you and you must honor the pact sworn by your house." He gestured at the setting sun. "And you must do it tonight, when Minnear is full in the vault. Feed as you will after honoring that obligation."

The devil's arms squirmed in agitation, muscles and scales rippling. The beady eyes looked at the Vwynn, at Rakon's sisters, at Rakon.

"Master?" prompted the sylph.

The seething horde of Vwynn was closer, tumbling toward them, their claws slipping and scrabbling on the glass surface of the crater.

"Those who rule your house will be as unhappy as I should the Pact fail, devil." The mouth in AbrakThyss's chest opened wide in a frustrated roar, but the huge shoulders slumped in surrender.

"Do your duty tonight and help me repopulate my house. Then return to Hell, take a mate, and repopulate your own. The Pact will be honored for generations to come."

Rakon took the devil's silence for agreement. "Now, sylph," he said.

The winds picked up, spinning shards of glass, bits of metal from the capsule, and dust into the air. Rakon, the devil, and his sisters rose up, lifted by the invisible, gusting grip of the air spirit.

As they rose, the Vwynn shrieked and howled in frustration. Abrak-Thyss answered with a frustrated roar of his own. The Vwynn kept coming, bounding over each other, slavering, all teeth and fangs. The sylph struggled to gain altitude, the weight of the devil perhaps challenging even the air spirit's abilities.

"Higher, sylph!" Rakon shouted.

The Vwynn massed below them, leaped up on their powerful legs, their claws slashing the air, teeth snapping in rage. Abrak-Thyss growled, lashed downward with one of his arms and plucked one of the leaping creatures from the air.

The creature wailed, writhed in the devil's grasp, slashed in a maddened frenzy with its claws at the serpentine arm, all to no avail. The devil's arm constricted the creature, shattering bones, and transferred the stillliving Vwynn to his other set of arms, which shoveled the Vwynn toward the central mouth in his chest. A single bite cut the creature in half, spraying blood into the sylph's swirling winds. The devil dropped the gory lower half of the Vwynn back into the mass of the Vwynn shrieking below, his great body shaking with mirth while he devoured the upper half.

They flew west, the immense, shifting but always winged form of the sylph outlined in crimson by the blood droplets of the Vwynn.

• • • •

Nix adjusted to the new form quickly. As a gull he flew with graceful, rapid beats of his wings. As a devil, he flew with long, ungainly strokes. He could scarcely see — the dying light of day pained his eyes and made him blink, and everything mostly an indistinct blur of red and orange and yellow — though his sense of smell was keen. The air above the Wastes, redolent with the scent of sulfur and ages long gone, acrid from alkalis, filled the slits of his nostrils. Ahead, he saw the ring of ruins. Vwynn thronged the glass sea, thousands of them, howling in maddened rage. A deep furrow gashed what had been the smooth surface and within it lay the metal fragments of some kind of lozengeshaped capsule. Empty now, it had blown open from the inside. They circled the area, looking for any sign of Rakon, the sylph, or what Nix assumed to be the freed devil, but saw nothing.

He shrieked in rage.

They were too late. Too godsdamned late.

And he had no idea how much longer the transmutational magic would last.

He plumbed the mnemonic fragments stuck in his mind by Rusilla, searching them for the location of the Norristru manse. It was the only place Rakon could go.

He found it right away, both its location and appearance, half a league to the west of Dur Follin, a series of squat, interconnected towers perched like an unlanced boil on the edge of a steep escarpment called the Shelf.

He shrieked at Egil, beat his wings, and arrowed west, as fast as their new forms allowed. Before long they could no longer outrun the sunset, and the day cast a final, coruscating blaze of red and orange across the sky before fading to night.

At once Nix's vision improved. The landscape below him was blue and black, the occasional holes that led down to the Vwynn's particular Hell glowed orange. Otherwise the Wastes were little more than a void, a lesion on the face of Ellerth. They flew on, their small bodies exhausted.

In time he tasted pepper and felt a familiar ache behind his eyes. It intensified as they flew, finally coalesced into haunting, terrified screams, a woman's screams. He heard them as though at a great distance, and at first he thought them the aftereffect of the storm of memories that had exploded out of the memory eater, but soon realized they weren't memories at all. They were too sharp, too acute, as jagged as the Wastes below. They were Rusilla's or Merelda's, invisible currents of terror that lodged in his mind and scarred his psyche, a trail of fear floating in her wake like psychic breadcrumbs.

He glanced over at Egil, his friend's scaled form knifing through the air, the membranous wings billowing like sails with each beat. The priest's slit, reptilian eyes were somehow still Egil's, and somehow still communicated the priest's pain.

Egil shrieked and Nix echoed it, their own cries sorry echoes of Rusilla and Merelda's. For the moment they could do nothing but endure, follow the fear, and use it to fire their need to catch Rakon and stop him. He pressed on.

Minnear rose, crawling into the sky until the pockmarked disc of its full face dominated the sky near the horizon.

The Thin Veil.

They had little time, but they'd already almost cleared the Wastes.

Ahead and to his left the blue-black of the jagged, broken Wastes gave way to a smooth sea of reds and oranges — the warm, stinking miasmic stretch of the Deadmire. They were close to Dur Follin. Soon he saw dots of red sprinkled on the horizon, the mage lights and watch fires of the city. He shrieked again and Egil answered in kind. To his right, the blue-black serpentine line of the Meander wound across the terrain, vanishing temporarily into the dark blot of the city, only to reappear on the other side to feed the Deadmire, its cool blue consumed by the steamy, organic heat of the swamp's red.

Following the invisible road delimited by the terror of Rusilla and Merelda's mental emanations, they angled northwest. The city soon came into clearer focus, west and east, rich and poor, divided by the thick line of the river. Ool's clock dominated the skyline on the near side of the city, its sharp, smooth surfaces a dark blue in Nix's vision, and the waters of the clock's perpetual cascade — the water's motion which powered the clock's workings — a lighter azure. The arc and towers of the Archbridge soared into the sky.

Seeing the bridge, remembering the huge, smooth blocks they'd seen in the ruins of the Wastes, Nix felt certain the same hands had been at work on both. The bridge had to be left over from the civilization that had died in the Wastes, the sole intact monument to a people who'd been destroyed, or who'd destroyed themselves. Considered that way, the bridge seemed not so much awe-inspiring as melancholy.

They wheeled over the city, high above its cracked and crumbling walls. Street lamps lit the maze of streets here and there, populated by the red blobs of pedestrians and animals. He looked to the Warrens and would have smiled had he been able. The absence of street lamps did nothing to dampen the sea of red that thronged the streets and alleys. People, animals, life. The Heap's decaying organic matter glowed red, yellow, and orange, a mountain of brilliant color. For the first time, he thought the Warrens possessed its own kind of beauty, a warm, stubborn glow of red, orange, and yellow, a beauty that birthed people like Mamabird.

Be that kind of man.

He would.

He was, or so he hoped.

They winged over the Archbridge, with its dozens of shrines and hundreds of faithful, and to the western bank of the Meander. The bridge was the terminus for the ordered spokes of the roads that divided Western Dur Follin into the Temple, City, and Noble Districts. Large manses, expansive plazas, and parks dotted the streetscape. Far fewer people filled the streets.

From up high, Western Dur Follin struck Nix as a lovely museum, a kind of tomb, enjoyable to look at, but devoid of life, absence the beautiful reds and yellows of the east.

As a boy, he'd craved a life across the Meander, amongst the clean streets and manses. Hell, as a man he'd wanted it, which is why he'd suggested to Egil that they buy the Slick Tunnel.

But he didn't want it anymore. He wasn't that kind of man. He was the kind of man who lived in the filth, heat, and beautiful decay of Eastern Dur Follin. He swooped over and past the wealth.

He realized that Rusilla and Merelda's mental screams had gone quiet. They must have lost consciousness or given up.

Or worse.

The city disappeared behind them, giving way to a patchwork of tilled land and farmsteads, the terrain sloping ever upward as they moved away from the Meander.

Ahead, he saw the steep escarpment traders called the Shelf. More than a long bowshot tall at its highest point, the Shelf served Dur Follin's wealthy as a location for their country homes, away from the hubbub of Dur Follin, a high perch from which they could look down on the city. It stretched a full league, running roughly north to south, and only two passes cut their way through it — the Neck and Zelchir's Fall. Otherwise, it presented only a sheer face of cracked, water-stained limestone.

A tingling ran the length of Nix's body. He recognized it immediately and mentally cursed. The magic of the wand was expiring. He shrieked at Egil, who must have been experiencing the same feeling, and the two of them sped through the night air as fast as their leathery wings would bear them. They needed to at least reach the top of the Shelf. If not, they'd have to leg it to the Neck or Zelchir's Fall to get up the escarpment, and that would add hours. Nix angled upward to get a better view. He'd know the Norristru manse if he saw it: its image was graven in his brain by memories not his own.

And there it was. Below and ahead Nix saw the cold stone walls and four squat towers of the Norristru manse, perched on the edge of the escarpment, as if the entire building were hanging on to the stone to prevent a fall over the edge.

Nix shrieked and started to descend. The tingling he felt sharpened to needle pricks. He had only moments.

The manse was part of a large walled compound that covered acres of gardens, orchards, and outbuildings. Even from a distance Nix could see that the whole of it was ill tended: gardens overgrown, walls crumbling, statuary toppled. Even a portion of the manse's roof had been removed or fallen into ruin. One corner of the upper floor stood exposed to the elements, the roof beams like ribs, the whole overlooking the cliff, the distant lights of Dur Follin.

Motion drew his eye: blobs of red distinct against the cold blue-backs of the cliff face — Rakon, his sisters, the hulking form of the devil. They flew in a swirl of blue winds provided by the sylph.

Nix squawked softly to ensure Egil had also seen. The priest's gaze was locked on them. They beat their wings and closed, moving much faster than the sylph. Perhaps bearing the devil put a strain on even the air spirit.

The hulking form of the devil reminded Nix of his brother, Vik-Thyss, whom Egil and Nix had slain in the tomb of Abn Thahl, thereby triggering everything that came after.

Abrak-Thyss was wider than his sibling, taller, the huge mouth where his neck should be filled with misshapen teeth as long as knives. Like Vik-Thyss, Abrak-Thyss had thick, lamprey-like arms that ended in toothy sphincters, but unlike Vik-Thyss, AbrakThyss had four arms: two at the shoulder, and two sprouting out of his chest under his mouth.

In his serpentine stalks the devil clutched the limp, delicate forms of Rusilla and Merelda. They dangled in his grasp, heads and arms thrown back, Rusilla's hair floating free in the sylph's winds like a pool of blood.

Seeing them in the devil's arms recalled to Nix his dreams, the memories he'd inherited from the eater, and kindled his anger to rage. He darted downward as the needle pricks of pain in his body gave way to a burning sensation. Aches flashed in his body here and there. He felt his form loosen as the magic began to dissipate. He shrieked urgency at Egil, both of them tucking in their wings and diving like shot quarrels toward their quarry. Nix had no idea what he would do when he reached them.

The magic of the wand expired during their dive. Nix transformed in mid-air, shedding his scaled form, the magic carving him back into his normal form. Wings gained size, rolled up into arms; Legs lengthened, thickened. Then everything transmogrified at once and he groaned with the pain of being reborn into his own body.

His descent was instantly fouled. He was hurtling toward Rakon and the devil, his heart in his throat, his stomach churning. He flapped his arms as if they were still wings, but that only served to make him cartwheel and tumble helplessly through the air. His field of vision spun wildly, a swirling mix of the night sky, the green moon, the devil, the Norristru manse below. His stomach rushed up into his throat and he could not hold back a shout.

Rakon heard it, for he spun around, looked up and back, eyes wide, and saw Nix plummeting toward him. Nix thought the sorcerer shouted something at the sylph or the devil. The sylph tried to veer right but too late.

Egil and Nix plummeted into the sylph's form and the winds of the creature, like an undulating pillow, absorbed some of their speed, but not enough. They slammed into the devil and Rakon in a tangle of limbs and shouts and chaos.

Nix crashed hard into the devil's back, the impact knocking the air from his lungs, slamming his jaw forcefully on the creature's scaled back, and sending them both tumbling. The devil roared, his arms flailing.

Nix saw sparks, his vision blurred, faded to black, but he deliberately bit down hard on his tongue before he lost consciousness. Warm blood filled his mouth, but the sharpness of the pain brought back his senses.

The sylph keened, the alarmed sound in the wind all around them, and the air bearing them all swirled chaotically, as if the sylph had lost control of its own body. Nix separated from the devil, and the pillow of air below seemed to give way. He was falling, buffeted by ordinary winds, tumbling, shouting, the rapid spins of his descent ruining his perception.

Shouts sounded all around him, mixed with the alarmed high-pitched keening of the sylph. Emptiness all around him. A disorienting, heart-pounding fall. He thought he caught sight of Rusilla and Merelda floating free of the devil's grasp. Perhaps the devil had released them when Nix had crashed into the creature, but he couldn't be sure. At the moment, he couldn't sort up from down, could not fix on any one thing for longer than a heartbeat. Sky, devil, moon, the manse below. Sky, devil, moon, the ground rushing up to meet him.

He tensed in anticipation of impact but it did little to prepare him for it. His legs clipped the edge of the roof of the manse, flipping him head over heels as he fell the remaining distance to the hard floor of the unroofed, exposed room below. He landed on his back and the impact sent spikes of pain through his spine, chest, arms, and legs. Other loud thumps sounded near him, groans, the sound of wood cracking, the devil's snarl. Winds buffeted him, the agitated swirl of the sylph.

"You are safely arrived at the manse, master," the sylph said, its voice like the breeze. "My duty is performed and I go. Pray do not call me again for another decade."

The winds ebbed and all was silent. Nix tried to move his hands, his legs. They protested with pain but they moved. He hadn't heard anything break. The sylph must have slowed the fall enough to let him survive it, at least for the moment. He turned his head to the side and spit the blood he'd earned from biting his tongue.

If Nix had survived, then so had Rakon, and so had the devil.