The Chorus wasn't affected by the flash grenade, and they tracked the other two assassins. They also spotted the thin strands of etheric energy rising off each man. Anchors. The filaments, like spider silk fluttering in the wind, trailed behind them, back through the wall of the church to their magi controller outside.
The Chorus roared down my arm, through the metal of the pistol, and kissed the remaining bullets in the gun. Linguae ignis, was the thought I had, but I couldn't recall the conscious decision to use that spell. The Chorus moved anyway, following a definite course of action. Popping across the tips of the bullets, they laid their trap. Seven, they reported.
More than enough, I thought. My wrist moved, and the gun left my hand. It was like throwing a coin into a bottomless welclass="underline" I let go, and it vanished; I never heard it hit bottom.
The Chorus swirled down into my chest, building a thunderhead of energy. Lightning streaked off their cloud, and the charge rejuvenated my stunned flesh. Like getting zapped with a car battery. Everything felt a little more alive. Everything became a little sharper.
I could hear a little now, and some of the flashes of light in my vision weren't retinal burns.
The other two gunmen approached. Keeping their distance, their weapons raised and ready. While they weren't magi-they didn't have any magick of their own-they were familiar with the occult practices, a familiarity that kept their fear mostly in check. Still, the sight of their buddy, who was vomiting more and more blood as he tried to get up, was starting to fracture their resolve. An animalistic thread of terror twisted in the gut of one, a familiar taste the Chorus read easily, and the other was a dense mass of chaotic thought. Some of it concerned the thread connecting him and his master.
The pair got close enough, and the Chorus darted out-a tongue of flame-and touched the pistol I had thrown. Their fire ignited the magick on the bullets, and the gun exploded.
When the gunmen reacted, I shoved the not-dead man off me and rolled forward, grabbing the foot of the thinking assassin. The Chorus found a nerve cluster in his ankle, and unleashed a furious lightning bolt from their energy cloud. The psychic energy pulse went up his leg, found his spine, raced up his back like a rocket launching, and exploded out the top of his head. His nervous system short-circuited, he dropped like a sack of rocks.
The other gunman reacted poorly, immobilized by the fear bubbling in his gut. The Chorus unleashed the rest of their storm, and the shockwave lifted him off his feet and hurled him across the width of the church. The psychic backlash from the spell upgraded my headache into migraine territory. Add to that the confusion from the flashbang and the Chorus' instinctive defense, and my circulatory system took up this internal pulse and echoed it all the way down to my toes. Pain, pain, pain.
Moving like a myopic sloth, I pulled the nerve-stunned gunman closer, pawing at his coat and shirt. He had the same hard ring on his chest, right over his heart. It was a ring of gray stone, cold to the touch, and my Chorus-bruised fingers traced the markings running along its surface. I couldn't make any sense of the script. Arcane shorthand, more symbolic than actualized.
What the hell was it? Not a protection sigil. My fiery hands had touched the first man easily enough. Yet the Chorus refused to get any closer, balking at my command to investigate the knot of energy held beneath the ring. The stone was filled with magick.
I started to reach for the silver strand rising off him, but stopped shy of actually touching it on the etheric layer. It was a conduit. I had seen them before. Magi used them to channel power to each other. To do remote viewing. In some extreme cases, they were used as a leash, a means of animating and controlling an otherwise reluctant host. In theory, it could be used to keep them alive. Energy flowed to them instead of the other direction.
But that didn't make much sense. To effectively transform that incoming energy, they had to know how to use it. They couldn't be passive receptors. They had to have some training. Otherwise it was just an open line, an unattended hose flooding the garden.
The Chorus boiled in frustration. There wasn't any energy flowing through the line, at least not an appreciable amount. A single pulse, rhythmic and steady, almost like a. . heartbeat.
Dead man switch. The Chorus finally spelled it out for me.
The strand was more than a conduit; it also monitored his body and soul. There was enough Will burned into the sigil that the conduit superseded the psychic link between flesh and spirit. As long as the conduit persisted, the soul couldn't leave the body. He couldn't die. Not until his master said so. Soul lock.
And when the signal came, the knot of power lodged in the gunman's chest would be released. In all of them. The assassination squad was on a suicide mission. They were a massive bomb, with linked detonators.
The mortally wounded gunman had rolled onto his back, and though my vision was still blurry, I could see that he was looking at me. He coughed, and his mouth moved into a smile. His eyes glittered with silver light, and I knew someone else was Watching.
The gunman coughed once more, and the breath that came out was his last one. His face spasmed once as all the pain he'd been carrying the last few minutes suddenly lit up his brain, and then the muscles in his face went slack. The silver light in his eyes intensified.
I scrambled to my feet, ignoring the pain in my shoulder and hip. My feet slid on the blood-slick floor as I tried to get as far away as possible from the downed gunmen before they died. Before the sigils on their stone rings activated.
The air in the church was thick, and I felt like I was swimming in water. My ears, still ringing and throbbing from the flash grenade, popped as the pressure in the room changed. The Chorus flexed, hardening against the explosion of the soul locks.
The psychic detonation hammered the room on multiple levels. My flesh frayed as flechettes of etheric energy sprayed from the nexus point of the explosion. The Chorus howled as the shards cut through them, tearing out slivers of their history.
Knocked sprawling against the pews, I held on as the ground rolled and undulated. Several of the nearby pillars cracked, disgorging clouds of granite dust from their peaks. In the transepts, stained-glass panels exploded, flinging shards of glass across the central nave like flights of frightened birds. The glass Christ swayed on his wooden cross, the psychic light of the explosion lighting up his painted skin.
Beneath him, braced against the altar, Father Cristobel struggled to stay upright. There was blood on his face, and his right arm flapped loosely at his side. His rosary beads were wrapped around his left arm, and they bounced off the side of the altar, sparks dancing off the magicked beads.
In the wake of the explosion, my stomach continued to flip back and forth, caught on a rollercoaster of muscle spasms. There was blood in my mouth-most of it mine this time-and the stains on my clothes were a combination of my wounds and blood from the gunshot assassin. I pried my clawed hands off the pew and staggered, drunkenly, toward the front of the church.
The Chorus still howled, their noise cutting through the blasting percussion of the headache. They were shouting something about the Abyss and I didn't understand what they were talking about for a second, and then I felt it too. Rather, I felt the void.
All of the gunmen had detonated, and the concussion of those souls going off had created a void in the church. Suddenly I realized why we had been cut off from the ley grid, why an oubliette had been erected around us: nature abhors a vacuum. The walls of the prison were gone, and all the channels that met in this church, all the natural confluence of energies that had been directed here to give Cristobel a nexus of power, were suddenly open again.