They might have caused an entire string of disasters, I thought. Or one of us thought. It was hard to be sure where I ended and my brothers began. For every successful experiment, there might have been a hundred explosive failures.
I pushed that thought aside as hard as I could and concentrated, my mind following the magic as it spewed out of our world. My body ached, so tired the word tired was a considerable understatement. My head throbbed with pain, my magic aching as it streamed out of my body and into the spell. I had enough power to daunt anyone short of a necromancer and yet, it barely seemed enough.
The four of us wove our spells together, careful to ensure the weight of the spellwork was shared equally. We couldn’t carry it alone.
No one could.
The air pulsed with power as something responded. I felt it pushing against our magic, slowly following it back to our world. Great heaving thoughts pulsed through the air, each one so loud it felt as if someone was shouting directly into my brain, yet so incomprehensibly vast I couldn’t even begin to understand them. I felt as if I’d gone fishing for minnows and suddenly discovered I’d caught a shark. The entity — the demon — was so vast my mind refused to look at it. And yet I knew, as I looked around the presence, that what I saw or sensed was like an iceberg. You see the top of an iceberg, poking out of the water, while the far greater remainder lurks under the sea.
It’s just a protuberance, I thought, numbly. A tiny fragment of something far — far — greater.
I understood, suddenly, how animals must think of us. Their worlds were so small and so mysterious. A tiny human settlement must be completely beyond their comprehension. Humans themselves were strange creatures, entities that sometimes helped and sometimes hindered and — mostly — went about their strange incomprehensible tasks, ignoring the world beneath their feet. The entity following our power back to the surface was… so alien it was easy to believe we were making a terrible mistake. And yet, our spells were already pulling it into our web. I saw it now, as reality groaned around us. Our spellwork was fragile, compared to the entity, but there were limits to how much of itself it could bring into our world. Reality itself was a far greater prison.
A man who gets his foot caught in a mantrap may be largely unharmed, I reflected. But he is still stuck in the trap, unable to escape.
The world seemed to pause, again, as the protuberance reached the surface. I tried not to flinch as the wardstone — somehow — grew even brighter. I could feel the charms starting to break under the pressure, too late to cost us everything. The wards were growing stronger, drawing power from both the surrounding forest and the demon itself. There was no way it could escape, according to our calculations. If it thrashed around, it would only make the bounds stronger; if it stayed still, the wild magic would keep it trapped. I felt the ground shake beneath our feet as the entity, the demon, started to manifest. The wardstone gave way to…
My head ached. The entity kept changing. It was a young woman, as naked as the day she was born; it was a young man, so handsome as to be utterly inhuman; it was a child and an old man and a monstrous creature and… the wardstone’s light had been bad enough, even when my eyes were closed, but the creature was worse. It was naked and yet there was no hint of vulnerability. I’d gazed upon a dragon, meeting the eyes of a creature that knew itself to be the apex predator, but this was different. If I had been alone, I would have dropped to my knees. It was still a very close-run thing.
“We bind you with our names,” Void said. Even he sounded tired and worn. “And we command you to assume a pleasant form.”
The entity changed, one final time. A young — and naked — woman looked at us, practically perfect in every way. I felt my manhood stiffen, felt a tug pull me out of the warding circle… I gritted my teeth, trying to close my eyes before realising they were already closed. The woman was too perfect to be real. Her face, her hair, her breasts, her legs… I tried to blot the image out of my mind, but it haunted me. It wasn’t until I risked looking at her eyes that I felt myself go limp. Her eyes weren’t human. They were cold and hard and so very — very — cruel.
Perversely, it made the next step easier. We raised our hands and chanted in unison. The demon girl regarded us calmly, saying nothing as the wards grew stronger. I shuddered as I saw her shape start to splinter, the inhumanly perfect body giving way to something so alien it was impossible to look at it. My head ached as we pressed onwards, sharing the pain as well as the effort. It was nearly over, I told myself, as the demon’s power started to flow into our wards. And yet… I saw a translucent smile lingering in the air, burning into my eyes. A flicker of fear ran down my spine. It felt as if something was about to go wrong…
“Stop,” someone snapped.
It took me seconds — precious seconds — to realise the voice was a human voice, and that it had come from outside the circle. My awareness seemed to splinter, part of my mind holding the giant ward network in place while the other half fell back into reality. Professor Bodoh was standing on the edge of the network, staring at us in horror. Magic sparkled around him as the spells reached for him… I swallowed, hard, as I realised what was about to happen. We hadn’t planned for a fifth person… how could we?
“You lied to me,” Professor Bodoh snapped. I screamed at him to run, to get out of the shrine before it was too late, but he didn’t seem to hear me. There was so much magic in the air that it was blinding him to what was really happening. “You lied…”
He must have changed his classroom, my mind yammered. And he was suspicious enough to check Robin when he returned to the school.
“The Grandmaster couldn’t have authorised this,” Professor Bodoh insisted. “You should…”
The magic spiked. Professor Bodoh’s body collapsed into a pile of dust, his magic drained in an instant. I felt my mind stagger as more power, uncontrolled power, rushed into the spellwork and…
In a flash, we lost control.
Chapter Seven
The demon laughed.
It was a hellish sound, ringing in our ears and tearing into our minds. It had known all along the ritual would fail… of course it had known! Our awareness was still expanding… we could feel the demon drawing on our spellware, altering it to allow more and more of the demon’s true form to manifest in the human world. It could no more survive in our world than I could at the bottom of the sea, but just like any magician it was already working to fix that problem. I could feel the walls of reality threatening to crumble as the demon rewrote the world to allow it to exist. Horror flowed through us. We hadn’t just failed. We’d doomed the entire world!
Move, I thought. Or spoke. I wasn’t sure. We have to stop it.
There was no time to worry about our personal safety as we plunged our minds into the spellware. The demon was immensely powerful, and perhaps even more intelligent than us, but it was operating at a severe disadvantage. There were limits to how much of itself it could push into our reality, not without rewriting the rules again and again. It could move with terrifying speed, yet as long as it was hampered… I felt reality itself scream, heard ghastly voices howling at the corner of our world, as we started to counter the demon’s attempts to rewrite our spellwork. We worked in unison, countering its moves and even starting to push it back. But we were just buying time. The demon had all the time in the world.