Chapter 29. Darker Than Night

  We teleported to the approximate spot where the pentagram might theoretically appear and stopped, scanning the street. An ordinary street in the Lavière district of Forland, located in the northern part of the city. Carriages rolled down the road, passersby hurried about their business. Some little boy was crying his heart out because he’d dropped his ice cream. And there we stood near a flower shop that smelled sweetly of roses displayed in pots outside, surrounded not only by bees but also by flower fairies — tiny butterfly-like creatures that lived in certain flowers and were considered something like living good-luck charms.

  No one paid any attention to us; everyone was busy with their own affairs.

  I looked around frantically, reaching out with my senses, but I couldn’t feel any unusual magical vibrations. My heart was pounding so hard it felt like a stone rattling in a tin can. How were we supposed to find what we were looking for? What signs should we even be looking for?

  “First, we need to check all the basements in this area,” Calypso said, also looking around tensely.

  “A person needs time to perform a ritual in at least relative peace and quiet; they’re not going to do it openly in front of people. So first we need to check all basements and any empty spaces we can find.”

  “Should we split up?” I asked, trying to gauge the scale of the search.

  “Absolutely not,” Calypso shook his head firmly.

  “It’s too dangerous. I’m not letting you out of my sight.”

  “But…”

  “No buts, Lori. We stick together.”

  We started searching, not entirely sure what we were even looking for. We merged our auras and kept scanning everything around us, hoping we’d sense “it”, if it was really happening right under our noses.

  We were running out of time, so we had to move fast. How long would it take Kes to reach one of our people and bring them to us? A couple of minutes? Five? A bit more? All we could do was guess — and act, act, instead of freezing in terrified anticipation…

  We moved through the nearby buildings with short magical jumps — those same crimson flashes Calypso used to vanish and instantly reappear somewhere else. It wasn’t quite teleportation; Calypso called these jumps “shadow pits,” because the essence of the spell was that the mage dropped into a “shadow pit” for a split second and immediately emerged at another point in space.

  This method didn’t allow for covering any serious distance, but for hopping between adjacent rooms and saving the time of running up stairs — it was perfect. Calypso had been teaching me this technique too, and I was making some progress. But it was very difficult, and I didn’t have confident control of it yet, so I just followed Calypso’s lead while he pulled me along, and I just helped with the energy.

  So we hopped through the floors of nearby buildings under cover of concealment charms, brazenly bursting into room after room looking for something especially dark or someone especially dark. In a couple of places we ran into some mages, but they clearly had nothing to do with shadow pentagrams, and they didn’t have time to sense us before we moved on.

  After another one of these “shadow pits,” Calypso and I both shuddered and stopped dead, staring at the building we’d ended up next to. It looked like an abandoned old school. The decrepit building stood in a courtyard behind the houses and seemed to have been slowly crumbling for a while, though for some reason it hadn’t been torn down yet. But we had no time to think about that — we could only feel the familiar magical vibrations. Bad ones. Very dark.

  “There,” Calypso said with certainty.

  And took off. I followed.

  “You feel it too?”

  Calypso nodded.

  “Wouldn’t a shadow pit be faster for getting inside?” I asked as we ran, barely keeping up with him.

  “Can’t jump here,” he shook his head while running, his hand smashing out the nearest window with a magically-reinforced blow.

  “There’s some kind of block.”

  “A shadow block?”

  “Something like that. Probably the reality warping this close to the breach.”

  “Are we too late?”

  “No. Not yet. Someone’s started the process but hasn’t finished it. That’s why there’s no anti-magical zone, but we’ve sharpened our sense of shadow magic so much lately that we picked up on it early, through the faintest shadow magic fluctuations. We can still make it.”

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  Please, please let us make it…

  We broke into the right room in no time — probably less than a minute. It turned out to be a former gym, gloomy and half-destroyed. Some windows were smashed, the floor paint was cracked and peeling, bits of old sports gear lay scattered along the walls. It smelled of dust, dampness, and something rotten.

  Someone in a blue cloak and black uniform was intently drawing a pentagram on the floor, right in the middle of the room. They were chanting something in an eerie, droning voice, and the pentagram’s pattern flashed and pulsed with crimson light at every word.

  The person saw us immediately. I couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman — they wore a hood, their face hidden by a murk, looking like one solid black spot; black gloves covered their hands, making it impossible to tell if they were male or female. Though judging by the stranger’s build, I was leaning toward them being a man.

  Anyway, this someone saw us immediately and attacked without hesitation. They were clearly in a hurry, so they didn’t waste time on chit-chat or warm-up spells — they hit us straight away with Breath of Darkness, a very dangerous, very dense spell from the realm of black magic.

  A poisonous black mist crept toward us, but we were already fighting back, defending and attacking at once. Or rather, I took care of powerful energy shields for both of us and focused on holding them, while Calypso blasted the stranger with some nasty stuff I couldn’t access yet.

  I didn’t get directly involved in the fight — I just kept feeding Calypso energy and surrounding him with dense protective barriers that the stranger in black shattered like eggshells. But I didn’t give up and kept putting up new defenses so Calypso wouldn’t have to waste time on that. Whoever this stranger was, they were incredibly powerful. I understood we couldn’t beat them, and Calypso surely knew it too. All we could do was buy time until backup arrived.

  The opponents were fighting at very high levels of magic right from the start. Cutting spells, poisonous mists, fire whips… The air practically hummed with tension, multicolored flashes lit up the space, windows rattled. But neither could land a single blow on the other. I watched Calypso try his hardest to break through the stranger’s defenses, but spells just bounced right off. Damn… What kind of invisible armor did this thing have? By all my estimates, we should have broken through by now, but nothing was working…

  Right then, the stranger did a flip in the air, dodging a spell, and their hood flew off.

  ‘A person’s hood?’ my inner voice finished nervously.

  Because the person didn’t really have a head. Instead, there was something like a pillar of black smoke that took on the semblance of a head, with ‘hair’ constantly in motion, smearing and ‘spreading’ through the air like black ink in water. No mouth; instead of eyes — two glowing purple slits vaguely resembling narrowed eyes.

  “What the hell is that thing?!” I exclaimed, unable to tear my eyes from the disturbing sight.

  “That’s not human… Then who is it? Or rather what?”

  “No idea. Definitely not Effu, but some seriously bad news,” Calypso muttered and intensified his attacks.

  I tried to at least get to the pentagram itself, to disrupt its outline, try to erase it… Yeah, right! Nothing worked; the stranger in black deflected all my spells, somehow managing to fend off both of us while actively attacking Calypso. The stranger’s hands flashed through the air so fast I couldn’t track the gestures. Who the hell was this?! Some new kind of demon or what?

  “You’re a very clever young man,” they said at some point, addressing Calypso.

  “And an interesting opponent. But you’re still very young and foolish, and you know far too little about shadow magic… Want me to fix that?”

  Their voice sounded strange, somehow echoing. It made their speech hard to process.

  “You’ve been looking for a guide in shadow magic for a long time, haven’t you? I could teach you depths of knowledge you can only dream of,” the stranger continued in a serpent-tempter’s tone.

  “I know everything about shadow magic. Absolutely everything. All the secrets of the darkest shadow magic are available to me, and I’ll share them generously if you play on my side…”

  “Do I look like an idiot who’d fall for that kind of rehearsed bullshit?” Calypso cut in, still attacking, sending a dozen lethal spheres at the stranger that swirled around the enemy trying to break through his defences.

  “Find some other sucker who’ll believe someone who claims to know ‘absolutely everything’ about any field. Only an idiot would believe words like that; any sane supreme mage would tell you there’s no ceiling in magic and it’s impossible to know absolutely everything about any sphere.”

  I snorted in agreement. Good thing Calypso wasn’t even considering listening to the stranger, because their pitch basically amounted to ‘come to the dark side, we have cookies.’

  “That’s for a supreme mage,” the stranger replied, not at all embarrassed.

  “But I’m not one. I’m above that.”

  Calypso didn’t react to those words; he was focused on breaking through the stranger’s protective cocoon with cutting charms and wasn’t interested in chatting.

  “Refusing, then? What a shame. But you’ve made your choice. And you, pretty girl?” the stranger addressed me.

  “Want me to teach you tricks like these?”

  With those words, they removed their black gloves, and I shuddered internally seeing that the stranger didn’t really have hands: instead there were just ‘tendrils’ made of the same black smoke as their head. The tendrils looked shapeless and blurry, though in gloves they’d looked like real hands.

  “He’s got serious problems with corporeality,” I said rapidly to Calypso.

  “He needs the clothes to maintain some semblance of human form - that’s his weak spot, we need to press on that.”

  Calypso nodded, but we didn’t get to do anything, because from those, um, hands, thousands of tendrils or whips burst toward us… It looked like the stranger’s hands had turned into thousands of ‘cords’, each one with a life of its own. I don’t know what to call these weird things, but neither Calypso nor I could fend off these whips.

  The crimson whips easily shattered all our protective barriers, sliced through them like a hot knife through butter… then wrapped around our bodies in a tight cocoon, suspending us upside down in the air. Couldn’t move our hands, no way to cast. I could see Calypso trying to hit the enemy with mental spells and verbal charms that didn’t require hand gestures, but the stranger immediately stopped that by wrapping the crimson whips not just around Calypso’s body, but covering his mouth and eyes too.

  Watching this waking nightmare, I decided not to scream or try verbal spells for now, so they wouldn’t gag me too. If Calypso couldn’t handle it, I definitely couldn’t, so there was no point in trying.