“I take it you have a plan,” I said. “What do you intend to do? Pick a fight with a necromancer?”
“We could take a necromancer,” Himilco said. “They have the power, we have the skill.”
“And that wouldn’t end badly at all,” Void said, with heavy sarcasm. “The last sorcerer who took down a necromancer? They accused him of being a necromancer himself.”
“They didn’t understand how he’d done it,” I reminded him. “There was a certain amount of luck involved.”
We brainstormed back and forth for hours, coming up with an entire stream of ideas that were impossible, crazy or both. We could try to clear the Blighted Lands of necromancers and claim them for ourselves, but there was no way we could kill them all. Killing one would push us to the limit, perhaps even beyond. We could sail into the ocean, see if there really was a continent on the far side of the world, yet we knew that no one who’d ever gone beyond the western horizon had ever been seen again. We argued over challenging a king for his kingdom, then debated the merits of setting up our own country, and then argued about the possibilities for simply walking into the Gathering and demanding respect and acknowledgement. None of the ideas seemed very workable. They certainly didn’t have any real prospect of convincing the family to accept us.
My heart sank as we sat back in our chairs. There was nothing. The hard truth was that there was nothing we could do with any guarantee of success, nothing that would convince the family to overlook our unfortunate birth. Our frustration hung in the air like a shroud, shared amongst us… perhaps it would be better to just leave. It would be easier to get respect as wandering sorcerers, rather than legal children.
“There’s one other possibility,” Void said. “But it will be incredibly dangerous.”
I felt the flicker of concern running through the air. Of all of us, Void was the one most inclined to push the limits as far as they would go. He was willing to take risks that would daunt normal men, even powerful sorcerers. Anything he considered incredibly dangerous was likely to be terrifying beyond words. And yet, he was also the most capable of thinking outside the box. His apprenticeship had been… unusual. His master had been a jack-of-all-trades and master-of-few.
Hamilcar cleared his throat. “What do you have in mind?”
“We need something that will make it impossible for the family to refuse to acknowledge us,” Void said. “We need a bargaining chip they simply cannot turn down.”
“We know that,” Hamilcar said. “What do we have?”
“Nothing,” Himilco said. “Nothing unique…”
“Not so,” Void said. “We have an… insight… no one else has.”
I leaned forward. “Get to the point.”
“We forced a demon to consume itself,” Void said, flatly. “I suggest we convert one into a power source.”
“What?” It was all I could do to speak. “Are you mad?”
“That didn’t work out too well for the last guy,” Hamilcar pointed out. “The demon he summoned nearly broke free.”
Himilco nodded. “Making a bargain with a demon is a bad idea,” he agreed. “We’d wind up dead. Or worse.”
I frowned. It was madness. Demons simply could not be trusted. The books we’d read had had hundreds of warnings, horror stories about the dangers of dealing with demons. No matter what you did, no matter how smart you were, trying to outwit a demon was incredibly dangerous. If you were lucky, you were killed very quickly; if you weren’t, the demon would lead you steadily towards the disaster, dropping a breadcrumb trail of knowledge and power that led right over a cliff.
Demons could not be trusted. Ever.
“I’m not talking about making a deal with a demon,” Void said, firmly. “I’m talking about using it as a source of power. We summon the demon and drain its power, using what remains of it to summon another demon, perhaps even open a permanent nexus point.”
My heart skipped a beat. No one understood how nexus points — sources of near-infinite magic — really worked. No one knew where the power came from, or what happened when the nexus point remained untapped. But one thing everyone knew was that, if you controlled a nexus point, you had enough power at your disposal to shake the world. You could erect the crudest of wards and yet keep them up against an army of sorcerers, just by drawing on the nexus point; you could build entire castles of raw magic, structures that literally could not exist without the nexus point. I’d heard stories of castles in the clouds or giant towers, reaching up to infinity; I’d seen Whitehall and Rose Red and Heart’s Eye, places shaped and maintained by nexus points. If we could tap into such power, even on a small scale, we’d have it made. The family would have to acknowledge us, if they wanted to partake in our bounty.
Himilco chuckled. “They couldn’t turn us down…”
“If it works,” Hamilcar said. His voice was hopeful, but he knew — we all knew — that it wouldn’t be easy. “Can we make it work?”
Void outlined his concept. I listened carefully, feeling a flicker of admiration. He didn’t think small. No one else could do it — no ritualists matched us, when it came to working as a team — but we could. The ritual would be incredibly complex — and we’d need things we couldn’t obtain easily — yet we could do it. We talked for hours, working our way through the plan and questioning every detail. It wasn’t easy — everything had to be checked and rechecked while bearing in mind it was purely theoretical — but it could be done.
“Theory is no substitute for practice,” Hamilcar said, echoing my own thoughts. “We need a certain amount of magic to trigger the spell and… we’re not going to get it.”
Himilco nodded. “Not unless we’re willing to risk necromancy.”
“We were designed to channel vast amounts of magic,” Void said, stubbornly. “We can do it.”
“No one can,” Himilco said. He tapped the table, warningly. “And even if we did, we’d have to kill someone.”
“Uncle Mago,” Hamilcar said, darkly. “No one would miss him.”
“The family would notice if we took him,” Himilco pointed out. “We are talking about sacrificing — about murdering — someone. That’s what we’re doing. And it will taint the ritual.”
My mind raced. Himilco was right. There was no way to get so much power without necromancy and no way to use necromancy without driving ourselves mad. And even if we took the risk, we’d have killed someone for power. The long-term effects of such an act might be disastrous. We were talking about the wildest of magics, the most dangerous… the arts no one would touch with a broomstick, if they had any other choice. Void’s concept was an elegant one, yet we couldn’t make the jump from theory to practice. Or could we…?
“There’s another way to do it,” I said, slowly. “We find a wild magic shrine and use the tainted magic as a power source.”
Void grinned at me. “Like we used the wild magic to force the demon to destroy itself?”
“In a manner of speaking,” I said. I took the parchment and started drawing out ward diagrams. Hamilcar looked unimpressed by my sketches but made sure to neaten up my concepts. “There are hundreds of places with high magic levels, places no one dares go unless they want to die. We go to one of them and use it as a power source.”
“And then use it to drag a demon out of the darkness,” Void finished. He took the parchment and added a few changes of his own. We knew what had gone wrong, back at the mansion. We had no intention of making the same mistakes. If the wards started to fray, the demon would be shoved back into the darkness before it was too late. “It should work.”
“Yeah,” Himilco said. His voice was flat. “There’s just one problem.”