“We have to find the wardstone,” I told them, flatly. There was no point in hanging around the lobby. The wardstone would be at the heart of the building. “Let’s go.”
The sense we were being watched grew stronger as we inched across the lobby, following the threats of magic as they led us down the corridor. The marble décor never changed. Long rows of portraits glared from the walls, their eyes seeming to follow us as we walked past them. I wondered, idly, if they were the sorcerer’s ancestors or if he’d just inherited them from the previous owners. There were legal precedents for fictional relationships that everyone took seriously, even though everyone also knew they simply didn’t exist. Or maybe they were just part of the defences…
Void hissed a warning as the corridor twisted. I cursed, snapping out a pair of protective spells. The trap would have caught us if we hadn’t shared a bond. The labyrinth spell was an impressive piece of work, warping the corridor into an endless circle that would hold any normal intruder prisoner until he starved to death… to us, the distortion was obvious. We reacted as one, three of us shooting more spells into the walls to keep them from twisting while Void attacked the spell directly. The entire building seemed to shake — I guessed a pocket dimension had collapsed — as the spell snapped out of existence. I was morbidly impressed. A sorcerer who’d set up a pocket dimension without a nexus point was clearly a very powerful and dangerous sorcerer indeed.
The paintings came to life a second later, ghostly figures floating towards us. I heard Hamilcar curse as a painting sliced at him with a translucent knife, a knife that proved to be real when it mattered. The sheer power involved in making the knife real, if only for a few seconds… by the gods, I hoped it meant we were dealing with the work of a dead Lone Power. All the other possibilities were worse. I threw a fireball at the ghost of a snooty aristocrat — the man was short, yet he still somehow managed to look down his nose at me — and cursed as it passed through and splashed against the far wall. Dispersal charms didn’t work either. Void stepped forward, casting a wave of fire that swept the walls and consumed the painting frames. The ghosts vanished with their paintings.
“Some people just like to be clever,” Void said. “They’d have got us if they’d just kept the paintings out of sight.”
I nodded as we hurried down the corridor, ducking, dodging or destroying the mansion’s defences. The statues came to life — again — and attacked us; powerful lights flickered and flared, voices whispering in our ears, speaking to our doubts and insecurities even as they promised us the world. We jumped into the air as the floor dropped from beneath our feet, drawing on all of our reserves to avoid a plunge into a second pit. The corridor thinned, the walls closing so sharply we had force them open… it would have been impossible, again, if we weren’t such a well-practiced team. A wave of illusions rushed towards me — my worst fears come to life — and broke against our shared will as I drew on my brothers for support. I could always rely on them. We were family.
The marble vanished, replaced by black walls glowing with eerie light. I led the way into the final chamber, darkness pulsing around me like a living thing. It was impossible to convince myself, now, that the defences were merely following orders. I could feel the threads of magic pulsing through the darkness, leading us onwards… they were connected to something, something intelligent. Did the sorcerer have a wife? A child? A partner? Perhaps even someone who’d broken into the mansion, before us, and taken control for himself? It wasn’t impossible…
… And then the darkness parted, revealing the nightmare at the heart of the mansion.
It stood in a circle, so disconcertingly human that it was hard to look at it directly. My brain refused to acknowledge its presence. It wore the form of a tall naked man, inhumanly perfect. Too perfect. It was impossible to believe it was human. It’s perfect face was so proud and haughty that it put my family in the shade. My legs wobbled as it met my eyes. It was like staring at a dragon, at a creature that knew, beyond all doubt, it was an apex predator. It was almost hypnotic. I had to bite my lips to keep from stumbling across the circle. If I broke it…
“A demon?” Void sounded astonished. We’d never seen a demon before. Technically, we weren’t supposed to know about them either. If we hadn’t been sneaking into the restricted parts of the school library since our first year, we wouldn’t have known anything. The tales of DemonMasters were so ancient it was impossible to say what had grown in the telling. “He used a demon to power his wards?”
“He was a little man with a great fear,” the demon said. Its voice, sickeningly sweet, seemed to reach my mind without going through my ears. It made my skin crawl. “And so he brought me out of the darkness to protect him.”
I stepped back, allowing Void and Hamilcar to examine the wards surrounding the circle. It looked absurdly fragile, little more than a line on the stone floor, but as long as it remained unbroken — if the restricted texts were telling the truth — the demon couldn’t escape. I forced myself to recall what I’d read about the nature of demons, about how they would take advantage of the slightest loophole to harm or even kill the fool who summoned them. They were bound never to lie, the books insisted, but that didn’t make them trustworthy. The best way to lie was to tell the truth in a manner that ensured you’d never be believed. My family was very good at it.
“You commanded the defences,” Void said, picking apart the charms. “He must have been sure he could control you.”
“He was a fool,” the demon said. It regarded us with polite interest, but I could see the malice behind its smile. No human bore that much malevolence towards anyone. “He got what he wanted.”
I saw it in a sudden flash of insight. The wards had started to collapse after the caster’s death. It was only a matter of time before the mansion collapsed too, the rubble breaking the circle and freeing the demon. The spells would release enough wild magic to feed the demon, allowing it to remain on the mortal plane long enough to do some real damage. I shuddered. The crazy madman had either planned it that way — perhaps he hated the world around him and wanted to make it pay — or he just hadn’t thought it through. I cursed him under my breath. How the hell were we supposed to stop a demon? I wasn’t sure it was even possible. A necromancer would be preferable.
The demon smirked. I shuddered. It could read my thoughts. It knew I knew what it had done. It knew there was nothing I could do about it. There was no way to banish the demon without breaking the circle and no way to break the circle without freeing it. It would be gone before we could work out a way to trap it… I cursed the dead sorcerer as I looked around, trying to find a way to reinforce the circle before it was too late. We needed specialised supplies and there were none. We hadn’t known to bring them…
Void laughed and cast a pair of spells into the ward network, taking control. “We don’t have to banish you,” he said, as he snapped orders to the rest of us. “We can use you instead.”
I saw it as we hurried to take our places. The ward network drew on the demon’s power. The sorcerer hadn’t been a complete idiot. The demon was powering the wards that were keeping it prisoner, effectively pinning itself. It had the same problem we had. It couldn’t free itself without tearing apart the wards and it couldn’t do that without falling back into the darkness. It needed the circle to come apart on its own…
“Perhaps we could make a bargain,” the demon said. I thought I heard a hint of desperation in its voice. Had we scared it? Or was it playing with us, as a cat might play with a mouse? “There is much I could offer you.”