Chapter 26
Thread That Binds
Panic boiled in the chamber. The Tribunal leapt from their dais in a flurry of black robes like a flock of startled ravens. Some Masters surrounded the bleeding guard, others fled.
“Who has breached the compound?” demanded the Master Bestiamancer, his dark eyes flashing amber.
“Th-they came through the Gateway,” the guard said between quick, choppy breaths. “I have no idea how. They sealed it again. We can’t get out. My comrades—oh god, they’re dead. They’re all dead. And he killed them. The Realmwalker killed them.”
Every head veered to Malachy.
“Mr. Bane has been before us this entire time. Explain yourself, guard.”
The guard’s wide eyes rolled from face to face, then landed on Malachy with a puzzled frown. “But you were just—”
A deafening crash cut off his words.
The enchanted barrier surrounding the Tribunal compound like a glass dome, cracked.
At first, water trickled from the cracks like rain pattering on the windows. Then it began to pour.
Water gushed through the spiderwebbing cracks and cascaded in heavy falls upon the stone below. The mages were trapped in a travertine coffin beneath leagues of dark water.
Screams and shouted orders reverberated off the thick walls. The Master Aeromancer and Master Hydromancer rushed from the chamber, though by their fearful expressions, it was to save themselves and not the shattering barrier their magic maintained.
Another loud boom sounded. The chamber shook. Windows shattered. Water fell in a deluge, flooding the chamber up to Malachy’s ankles as he fought through the confusion towards Cora.
Master Nastassja threw herself in his path. The petite Choromancer’s grip was shockingly strong on his shoulders. “Traverse us out, Realmwalker!” Nastassja cried, a demand and a plea. “If the Gateway is sealed, you must find a way to traverse us to the surface!”
“After you just sentenced me to death? Fuck off. Save yourselves.” Pushing her aside, he sloshed his way towards Cora, frozen in uncertain terror. “Are you all right?”
“Of course not! The Tribunal’s compound is supposed to be impenetrable. Who the bloody hell broke in?”
His gaze swept over the pandemonium. The attackers had killed the guards before the barrier was ruptured. They had already been inside the compound when they blew it open. And the only way in and out was through the Gateway, which required the blood of three Masters willingly given to operate.
This was an inside job. Three traitors had sat before Malachy as they declared him guilty. In the uproar, he noticed that Lakwa and Bittenbinder had disappeared.
“They didn’t break in,” Malachy said. “Someone held the fuckin’ door open for them.”
Cold water rose up to his shins. Downpours cascaded through every crack in indoor waterfalls. The barrier overhead was at imminent risk of shattering. Soon, they would be flooded in a torrent not even a Master mage could survive.
The windows above the chamber door burst. Through the curtain of water obscuring the only exit, Malachy glimpsed dark silhouettes on the other side.
Five monstrous figures slipped through the shimmering veil of water, led by an abomination. The mismatched halves of his ghoulish body were baptized by the water he would soon drown the Tribunal in.
A motley crew surrounded Alastair Ghose like a cancerous nucleus.
A demon Phytomancer, shrouded in black vines that reared like serpents about to strike.
A fire demon, engulfed in lethal blue flames.
A water demon parted the knee-deep waters like he was fucking Moses.
And on Ghose’s right was a demon wearing Malachy’s face.
Malachy remembered the illusion demon he had encountered through a towering mirror decades ago.
The demon had borrowed his face in return for the cursed Doomsday Watch, now clasped in Ghose’s gruesome hand.
The illusion demon was a simulacrum of Malachy's likeness, with its gaunt body and ribs jutting out like broken piano keys, yet it had been convincing enough to fool Lt. Potts and Sloane.
“Masters of the Tribunal,” Ghose said. His Scottish burr was harsh from the puckered seam running along his vocal cords where he had been crudely stitched together.
“How good of you to welcome me back. Or should I say, how good of some of you to welcome me back.” He turned to his demon retinue.
“Find the Necromancer. Bring her back, alive. Kill everyone else.”
The demons launched themselves, in volleys of fire and strangulating vines, at the Masters.
The Master Ferromancer fired her pistol in quick succession.
The enchanted bullets curved to find home, buried in the mutilated body of the illusion demon.
It died wearing Malachy’s face, contorted into a rictus grin.
A serpentine vine cracked like a whip and wrapped around the Master Ferromancer’s waist, hefting her into the air.
She screamed, her enchanted revolver splashing into the deepening waters below.
The plant demon lashed another fanged vine around Master Rojas and bound her limbs, twisting them at grotesque angles overhead.
She cried out, her blood dripping down like rain.
The Master Bestiamancer disappeared in a pool of ceremonial robes, and a bearded vulture emerged.
Red eyes flashed. Enormous wings spread ten feet wide, its feathers painted in blood.
The vulture launched itself at the plant demon with a fearsome shriek.
Its beak tore vicious chunks of ivy-crusted flesh.
A wet, guttural cry erupted from the demon’s shredded mouth.
The vines recoiled, and the Master Ferromancer dropped into dark waters.
Malachy snatched Cora’s arm. “Come on, I’m getting you out.” He sensed the compound’s anti-traversing wards weakening while under attack, but they were still stronger than him. He needed to find another way for her to escape.
She whirled on him. “I’m not leaving you here.”
Over her stubborn head, his gaze connected with the black-on-black eyes of the demon sewn together by coarse thread. Ghose’s oil slick gaze held him at knifepoint. The demon smiled, half glee, half despair.
Cold fury surged through Malachy. When he ripped Ghose apart, this time it would be in more than two pieces.
First, he needed to mow down the demon meat shield Ghose surrounded himself with. The wisps of a plan materialized in his mind.
With his gaze locked on the time demon, he said to Cora, “I kill, you reanimate. Then we send him to hell.”
Ghose glided towards them through thigh-deep water.
The fallen bodies of mages and demons floated in the current.
He ducked under a fanged vine as it snapped overhead and struck down the bearded vulture.
The Master Bestiamancer transformed back into a man, nude and bloodied, as Kabir dropped beneath the waters.
More windows ruptured under the pressure. Dozens of waterfalls poured forth, obscuring the demons in shifting torrents of blood-laced water. The flooded chamber made each step laborious. But not for a portal mage.
The Realmwalker was a blur of eloquent violence as he blinked in and out of existence through sheets of water.
Malachy traversed behind the plant demon and his poisonous vines and slashed the knife Cora had smuggled into the compound across the demon’s throat.
Blood spurted in a fountain. The demon was dead before it hit the water.
Ghose shouted, his words lost to the roar of water. The demons whipped around, fear and confusion shining in their black eyes.
Malachy dodged a flaming projectile from the fire demon. Traversing from above, he landed on the demon with his full weight. A slash of his knife, and the fire demon was extinguished. Rivulets of blood sluiced away like sewage down the gutter.
One by one, Malachy traversed in and out of the waterfalls and dropped the demons into waters that ran crimson with their blood.
They did not stay down for long. Cora reanimated the freshly dead corpses, her eyes rolled back and necrotic veins spreading.
One by one the slain, slack-faced lackeys circled their Master.
Ghose was surrounded.
The corpses staggered closer, their slit throats like red smiling mouths, their outstretched limbs twisted at grotesque angles. Ghose fell back a step. His grisly head swiveled. The reanimated bodies hemmed in him. Ghose’s black eyes found Malachy as he held the Doomsday Watch aloft.
Time grew syrupy around them. The gushing water slowed to a trickle.
Malachy and Cora fought against the congealing time and the hip-deep water, but Ghose took two steps to their every half-step. Malachy linked his arm through Cora’s and traversed them through a smear of a portal, hurling them inside the time bubble’s barrier moments before it sealed.
Inside, time flowed. Outside, the flooded fortress was frozen.
Cora commanded the two corpses inside the time bubble to restrain Ghose. The time demon bucked and thrashed, knocking one of the corpses down. The Unweaver bade her dead puppets to bring Ghose to his knees, and he dropped with a splash.
The Doomsday Watch slipped from his fingers into bloody waters. A flash of silver, and it sank away.
Malachy looked down at his former Master. The demon looked up, his face half contorted in a grimace, half stretched in a smile.
“Killing you a second time won’t make up for what you’ve done, Ghose. But it’s a fuckin’ start.”
Malachy exchanged a glance with Cora. Water beaded on her lashes like tears. She nodded.
Before his arrest, he had outlined his plan for ridding the world of the time demon, but there had been no opportunity to practice. Unsure if they could even pull it off, he slashed the knife across his palm and then tossed it to Cora. Without question, she sliced her own palm.
They joined their bleeding hands together over the corpse-pinned demon. Their magic fused and sparked in a shimmering current of energy.