Chapter 40
Armageddon
With the disappearance of Gwendolyn, Bianca felt warmth. It started somewhere undefinable and spread to her torso, and then to her limbs. It wasn't unlike being immersed in the amniotic fluid of the operational sphere, but without the suffocation. She was just about to ask when she realized it was mana. She felt metaphysically and found another energy source, like the strategic mana reserve, but from another location. And it was hers to draw from.
How long had Gwendolyn been stockpiling mana? The entire three thousand years since the first cataclysm? If so, she was, indeed, patient.
Bianca synchronized with the Ævatar body and stirred. The gods had withdrawn a pace and stood, watching her warily. They looked nervous. That made her happy. She drew her knife.
Sky Father scowled at this and looked sternly upon her. “Foul magics you may have. But do you dare pursue this? Do you really think you can fight three gods together?”
“Easily,” thought Bianca, bathing in the radiance of the mana. She tossed the knife from one hand to the other and nodded.
“How about eight?” came a new voice. Bianca turned sharply. From the shadows came a stern faced woman with fire in her eyes. She wore clothes woven of burning embers and held a poker with a red hot end. Hearth Mother strode forward and stood next to Sky Father, in front of Water Bearer. To the other side stepped a strong man, wearing traditional Romitu armor, with a scarred face and grey eyes. Martius, god of war, stood to Sky Father's left. Filling in behind them were The Harper, clothed in his aspect of a drunken brawler and The Weaver, fingering her net seriously.
Bianca looked from each face to the next. Eight gods. She had barely held against one before, and crumbled when two teamed up on her. But that was with virtually no mana. She felt this new reserve, plumbed its depths. It was large, but not vast. She could not do it head to head in a contest of mana versus mana. Nor, did she reckon that the binding trick would work. That was sufficient to hold a god once down, but Grave Keeper proved that another unbound god could easily undo it.
The gods straightened, and looked at her with renewed confidence as she hesitated. But Bianca's mind was racing. Everything seemed to slow down. She considered patterns and spell phrases, fitting each together and discarding them, quickly searching for a solution.
In the center was the pattern of her knife. She had that well and of high fidelity. Every fold and tempering of the steel was recorded since she held it herself and had made it herself. To that there was no difficulty in attaching phrases to make it more potent. Seekers to guide it towards flesh and repellers to guide it away from armor, movement amplification to give more weight to the thrusts, and even a animation spell to return it to her should she throw it. That could be a nasty surprise in a pinch.
These are all pretty standard. But a new idea had been forming in her head. She took the patterns for the anmanic field and turned them inside out. Instead of keeping magic from passing outside, it kept magic from passing in. She bound the output of the adsorbed magic into a simple self-strengthening and growth spell. Then she bound the shape of the field to an in-potentia phrase and wrapped the whole thing in a trigger pattern. This she bound to the knife to be activated, with a repeat phrase, upon a strike to flesh. And, when activated, it was to launch with a quick seeker to discover the pattern of the wound made and fill in the in-potentia placeholder of the field. Everything fell into place and her mind slowed back down to normal.
A smile played about her face. She felt the weight of the knife in her hand. It was just like her most familiar weapon. But now, the cuts it made would not just wound the bodies of the gods, but would leave a spell lodged in them, canker like. This spell would adsorb the energy from attempts to cure it, or the flesh around it, and, instead, expand the wound further. There would be blood on the sand in this fight. And, with skill and luck, she could win at eight to one odds.
Bianca straightened up, did a quick pattern and summoning phrase, and dropped what felt like a single erg of mana into the spell. All of the soot in the district of slums they stood in was instantly drawn to them and coated everyone in thick, black choking clouds. As Bianca dived and rolled to get a new position, in the back of her mind she was thinking of the municipal benefit such soot cleaning would have in reducing chimney fires. But then she was back up, in a crouch and reaching out. She felt tough muscles flinch against her. She was where she expected. She drew back and plunged her dagger deep into Sky Father's chest.
Not waiting to see the result, she sprinted away to change position. The chaos would only last a few moments, and she had to make the most of it. She quickly circled back from a different direction. Blackness still enveloped everything and her Ævatar's cat like eyes didn't help. But with that inspiration she reached out a simple seeking spell, brought back a pattern, and then force-grew magical tendrils of cat's whiskers from her hands. She swept them back and forth, found another target, and lunged forward and low, and sliced someone's hamstrings.
Upon this retreat she stayed. They had got their wits and were listening for her while Water Bearer brought a deluge down to clear the smoke from the air. Bianca took a pattern from a nearby tenement, and raised a section of fallen masonry into a façade to screen her.
It was Martius who came prowling in her direction first, backed up by The Harper. Martius's reactions were up to hers and he managed to dodge her thrust thorough a window of her hideout. He countered quickly and smashed the thin wall to pieces. She broke cover and dived over a row of houses into a neighboring street.
Uncaring, Martius smashed through those too, to bear down upon her. Distantly she heard the screaming as the occupants who had not yet fled either ran or perished. Magically she grabbed up a handful of slates from nearby roofs and sent them sailing towards Martius' face in a stream. While he blocked high she lunged in with the knife low and caught him a dig under the ribs.
Bianca then felt herself caught by both arms from behind. It was The Harper trying to pin her like a wrestler. Martius took quick advantage of her immobility and lifted his sword high overhead. Bianca pressed back upon The Harper and lifted a relatively intact chimney stack from the rubble with her feet. It smashed into pieces, but dulled Martius's blow enough to slow him. With a bit of magical impetus Bianca overbalanced him forward, and as he fell grabbed him around his neck with her legs.
The Harper's pin on her just immobilized her, while hers on Martius was suffocating. It was to her advantage as long as there was no third party. She scanned and, sure enough, Water Bearer was hovering nearby winding up a hurricane of water. Bianca was ready when she flung it, and bent inwards, using Martius as a shield. He bore the brunt but the blast broke them up and separated them.
Bianca got her feet under her and made for the dockside. She heard Martius, quick on her heels, thundering after her. She put on a burst of speed to draw him out away from the others. When she got to the edge of the river Dubr she leapt high into the air and smashed down on the other side, into the City of the Dead. With a sweep she gathered up a magical armload of smashed tombs and flung them at Martius, mid leap. That halted him and sent him plummeting into the river. Bianca sent the tombstones down upon him, magically bound into a solid mass, to hold him there. She wrapped that with an anmanic field and froze that section of the river, for good measure. They could dig him out, but it would take one of them time and effort.
Bianca did a slow turn to see what quarter she could expect the next attack to come from. A small flash drew her attention to her feet. A small party of people was there and appeared to have just cast a spell on her. She looked closer and saw a collection of priests of the Grave Keeper. The spell, of course, was utterly ineffectual on a creature the size of her Ævatar. But she admired their pluck for trying. If she ignored them, they would probably get trampled underfoot. So, instead, she swept them up and deposited them on the ice floe in the river. That should keep them out of the way for now.
When she turned back, The Gr
ave Keeper himself was there. He could have struck her back, but had withheld. Was it because she held his worshipers, or because of her gesture to spare his worshipers? It did not matter as the moment passed. He raised both his arms and the dead of the graveyard crawled up, maggot like. They began to assemble themselves in a heap before Grave Keeper.
Bianca had seen this before. In hell when they fought the demon lord Halphas. He had built a huge body from his minions. She was not going to let things go down that route. With a blast of mana she blew apart the mound, disintegrating and scattering the pieces.
Grave Keeper scowled at her. He raised his arms again holding his scythe high. Bianca felt for her shield reflexively, but, of course, it wasn't there. She brought up her hands and released a pattern recognition phrase to see what he was doing. It only returned a confused jumble, as with most old magic. However her eyes saw the armor on her arms first tarnish, the cover over with a patina of oxidization. She realized it was this was the same spell he had used to age the troops to senility. Lilly said it was unlikely to affect the Ævatar, but she couldn't be sure what it would do to her equipment or if it would reach the operational sphere.
Time seemed to slow down again. Patterns flowed before her. Aging could be simulated by opposed motion pulling in different directions. The counter to that would be to inhibit all motion. But that wouldn't age metal like she had seen. Altering the flow of time itself was difficult. But mostly that would cause the passage of time to appear differently. To do so for just her inanimate objects would require targeting them specifically. That was too convoluted. Perhaps if aging was a disease, he was applying the pattern of the disease to her and reinforcing and accelerating it. But it was hard to understand how a malady could affect metal.
Bianca pulled herself out of her analysis. Dead end after dead end was getting her nowhere. She focused on Grave Keeper until her vision zoomed in on him. In one fluid motion she pulled out her knife and flung it across the space between them. It arced across the graveyard, spinning one complete revolution. It then lodged deeply and firmly in The Grave Keeper's throat.