Chapter 3
Below, the lights of the city blazed into the night. Strains of wild, disconcordant music broke the night, underlined by the shouts of drunks, screams of passion and the cries of the tortured. Hulia, Commander of the Gir’Thia looked at the ranked fiends behind him. He smiled, fangs showing as his red face took on a mask of cruelty, there was no joy in that smile, merely the look of a predator about to feed.
“Our task is simple. Go in, kill as many of the revellers as we can, get out. None of you can truly die on this plane, so fear not, if you fall, you will be returned to us shortly. We break up their celebrations, free some of their slaves, and deny the worship of Jelial, turning their ceremony into a bloodbath!” Hulia laughed, “this is a task I am sure we can all enjoy!”
The devils behind him pressed forward eagerly, each opening a small wound on their fingers to let their blood anoint the blood red blades of their scythes. Each scythe took on a green glow, and with their faces reflecting black in the night, the green mingling with the red of their flesh, each winked out, reappearing in the city to create mayhem.
Hulia laughed as he appeared in the midst of a drunken group; half-fiends, fiend touched and their offspring danced around him, celebrating and shouting out their love for Jelial. A few looked up, saw he was a fiend, and returned to their party. But not for long- his scythe shot out, swung out in a wide arc, two heads flew through the night, whilst another grabbed at his intestines as they spilled from his body. Laughing, Hulia jumped into the middle of a group, his scythe coating him in the blood of others, even as he opened his mouth wide to drink in the rain of blood that flew around him. His joy knew no bounds when he realised that he had come into the midst of a group of the fiend’s children, who sat their staring in fear. The slaughter awoke joy -in his heart, the fierce joy of murder, destruction and the sewing of fear for no reason other than he could. Yet, he pulled himself from his blood frenzy when the city reacted and sent their troops after him. The nights work was done. With a mocking glance he looked at the fiends coming to hunt him, “Your master Jelial is but a second rate fiend with no power. He fled from his true Master , the ruler of the eighth, and came here to lead a pack of worthless hounds. Return home, offer obeisance to your true Master, and leave Jelial to rot in his self-imposed exile!” He waved his scythe, blood from it flying off, but he had disappeared, teleported to safety, before that blood had touched the ground.
General D’Haan stood before the council. The ranked dwarven nobility were silent, considering what he had said.
“So you say the Gir’Thia go into the cities of Jelial, massacre hundreds of innocents, and then leave? That they do not differentiate between innocent and guilty, child and soldier?” Kier’s voice was gruff, his question pointed. “We ally with those that are no better than our enemy!” The High Priest of the Forge father looked around the table. His eyes blazing in fury, “Do they give any excuse for their actions? For their wanton slaughter or do they do it merely for enjoyment.”
“Clam yourself, High One. They claim to have good intentions, that they disrupt the revels that are designed to feed power to Jelial for divine ascension. Their motives are correct, though obviously their means are ones we cannot condone.” General D’Haan looked at the priest, “They do something we cannot in pushing the revels off from their intended effect. Do we have room to complain?”
The King leaned back in his chair, his hand rising to finger the hammer of the Forge Father, his symbol of office that rested on the table before him. “Do we stare into the face of evil and remain silent? In doing so, do we not stand to loose what we are? We fear for us, We fear we will become our enemy, willing to do anything to win and in so doing loose everything we have, even in victory.”
The King stood, his decision made. “We will summon Eria, We will tell Eria we are against these raids. There is not much we can do if he chooses not to stop them for we cannot enter into an open war with Sechariab and his Master. But we will speak, and hopefully we can try to moderate some of the worst excesses.”
Slowly each member of the council stood, bowed to the king, and left. Sighing, the king sat down as Eria materialised form a corner of the room.
“I told you they would find out, and it would be a problem.” Eria looked at the King, his face betraying nothing of his thoughts, the perfect diplomat. “So, what do we do now?”
“What do we do? We continue to do what we have to do. The Gir’Thia must continue to break up the revels, to cause them to question the ability of Jelial to protect them, even within their own cities. We need the doubt to prevent Jelial’s ascension- did you not tell me that yourself?”
Eria turned rapidly, looking at the door where High Priest Kier stood, his mouth open.
“So, my liege, even as we talk you have a fiend listen in. You break the sanctity of Council to let one such as this hear our deliberations. You state one thing to council, and then act in a different way? Brother, you have lost your mind!” Kier’s voice was low, angry, emotion driving him as he entered back into the council chamber, facing his brother, ignoring Eria, “What drives you to this madness? What sorcery causes you to act thus?”
King D’Mier looked at his brother, the one who had foresworn the throne in favour of serving the Forge Father. “Kier, do you realise what we face? Jelial reaches for divinity, the revels are part of his means. I sell myself, my place in the Forge Father’s halls in order to ensure my people will be safe. Let the Council and the people out there rest in their innocence, let them think that we can have victory without the cost of sinking into depravity. I rule Kier, I make the sacrifice of my own soul for the benefit of my people.”
Kier looked at his brother, saw the sadness, the desperation of one who had lost a son to an assassin in the city, who placed the burden of their entire race on his own shoulders. “You say you willingly give up your place in the Halls of the Forge Father to save us all. Brother, you have lost the path, you need to return and look for other ways.” Kier turned to Eria, his eyes locking with those of the fiend. “You have corrupted him, you brought him to this, to the point where, in despair, he acts like one of you.”
Eria shook his head sadly. “No, Holy One, you do not understand. I told him what Jelial sought and how he was going about it. It was your brother’s plan to use the Gir’Thia to attack them in their cities, to slaughter the innocent to create despair and thus turn them away from Jelial. He’s right, of course, it is one of the best ways that, despair.”
Kier, unbelieving turned to his brother, looked into his eyes, and knew the devil spoke the truth.
***
The ground where Sister Egrit had sat was scoured clean. The sand was fused into black glass, the plants along the edges burnt, the smell of their taint burning the nostrils of those standing around. Numbly, Jeria felt the ground. He could not believe this turn of events.
“What was that?” Dialre looked at the place where Jeria knelt, her question a mere utterance of everyone’s thoughts.
“My guess? We just saw Jelial’s trap for the celestials at work. Evidently he has altered it, made it more powerful since they helped us defeat him at the battles for Harmony Hall and the Fort of Peaks.” Mekior felt along the edges of the fused earth, his fingers reaching under to heave up the disk. “Look, beneath, the ground is clean of taint.”
D’Fir looked, his brows contracting in consternation. “Surely an act of that should have increased the taint from the fiendish sorceries involved, yet it appears to have cleansed it instead!”
Dialre stood, raising her hands in front of her. “By the Great Mother, talk to me.” She knelt down, digging her hands into the earth, her eyes glazing over as the sand ran through her fingers. The others watched in consternation, never before having seen her invoke any form of arcane or divine power.
For an hour she sat, hunched over, her hands continuously digging into the cold, hard earth, the sand running through her fingers. Slowly her eyes turned to normal as she sighed and toppled over.
“I hate doing that, I will have back ache for days!” Dialre slowly stood, stretching her back, trying to relieve the pain of muscles knotted from being in such an awkward position. She looked at the three around her, looking at her questioningly.
“So, I worship the Great Mother, the Earth Mother whose very being is being corrupted by these fiends. More than most, we seek to rid the world of these fiends, for it is not just us that are threatened, but our very Mother and the sustainer of us all!”
Jeria smiled. “I have never met a worshipper of the Mother that could commune with her. I thought them all gone, along with the rest of those who sought the help of the Gods, help that never came.” Jeria looked at her, remembering the consigning of the body of Gruzz to the Earth Mother many years ago on the journey with Gyv and Mekior, the journey on which he had met his father.
“There are not many of us, and we stay hidden. In the first purges the fiends sought to kill us all, they hate us more than even those who worship Gods dedicated to their destruction. Our sustaining of the Mother fights their corruption- most of us spend our time in healing the wounds of our Mother, we do not call on her powers lightly, for she needs her power to fight the taint.” Dialre closed her eyes, lying back on the cold ground, her body flat against the earth. A short while later she sat, refreshed from her contact with the Great Mother.
“I must tell you what I learnt when I communed with the Mother. The power that took Sister Egrit, it was not that of the devils, but something colder, something that is as alien to the fiends as it is to us. Jelial bargains with this power, yet he does not rule it. What it does with the captured celestials is unknown, most probably to Jelial as well. One thing, though, is that it took her. She may be grievously wounded, but she is still alive.”
“So, our search for the secrets of the Celestial trap just got even more important, now we need to rescue one of our own.” D’Fir looked into the darkness, pulling his thick jacket around him as he came closer to the fire. “Yet I suffer, as does Dialre, from this abominable cold. If our search is even further north, then how do we proceed? I cannot survive much more of this cold, and I doubt Dialre can either!”
“The Mother did show me one more thing. Nearby there is an underground entrance. Beneath, the caverns are warmed by the earth beneath, though we will have to be careful as in places the crust is thin and molten stone flows, hidden from sight.” Dialre looked to an outcropping not far off. “We will have some work to do to find our entrance, but once beneath we can proceed Northwards, though I do not know if it will go far enough to get us to our destination.”
***
Glazerou followed his guide. The small, emaciated fiend moved with surprising agility. Watching it, Glazerou wondered how it stayed so thin, every time he glanced over, it seemed to have caught yet another small creature on which it feasted, stuffing it whole down its gullet, occasionally spitting out tails or feathers. He had not lost his curiosity about the fiends along with his freedom, but he had lost the courage to voice his questions. So he stayed silent and wondered.
For five days the fiend led his people through the forest, before it came out on the side of a mountain into what had obviously been a battlefield. Bodies of fiends, humans and other littered the ground. Looking at it, Glazerou at first assumed the battle was fresh as the corpses lay there whole, undecaying. But when their guide went to one of the corpses and tried to wrestle a piece off to eat, the body suddenly rose, think tendrils of red linking it to the ground. Quickly it grabbed the fiend, its mouth opening wide as it bit off its head, and then sucked out the insides of its body. Quickly, it finished, and then sank back into quiescence. Glazerou did not need to see more to fear,
“Find the entrance to the caverns on this mountain, and leave the corpses. Do not touch them or attempt to molest them in anyway!”
Quickly his men moved to obey, but as they moved amongst the corpses, they rose, some obtaining victims, others missing. Galzerou could see he had no option. With a wave, he sent his undead forces in, the mobile undead vs the tethered undead. Those tethered to the ground were stronger than ordinary zombies or the minor undead, but the sheer numbers that Glazerou commanded overwhelmed the forces they faced. Dismayed, Glazerou looked at his forces- he had lost hundreds of servants, though only a handful of those with any sense of will. Silently, the undead started to clear the battlefield as those more capable searched for a cavern entrance.
It didn’t take long. The entrance was found underneath some loose boulders, piled over it some time in the past to hide the passage that had been hewn out to allow the passage of an army. While happy with the discovery, Glazerou was upset that it had been found at the cost of yet more of his undead troops- it had been discovered by them setting off an avalanche and being trapped beneath it. So five more dead troops, and the rest cleared the loose rack and shale out of the way.
“My lord, do we go in?” Videk towered over his king. Before the corruption had taken, he had been tall and well built- the corruption had twisted him, making him even taller, easily eight foot, but his legs had split, giving him four legs which more often than not got in his way. Or so he pretended, Glazerou had spied on him using arcane means as he trained, and, in truth, he moved faster and quicker than any normal man though he kept that hidden, an advantage in a court where assassination was a tool of diplomacy – both in love and war.
“Of course we do. We find this city Jelial spoke of and rebuild it as we were ordered to do so. We obey, we always obey.” With that, Glazerou stared back in the direction of the bay, their ships, and a home destroyed and to be forgotten.
