We turned to go. Heading up the stairs as a group. Mags, me, Green eyes, Peter and Paige.
“You have a strategy,” Mags said. “You were saying, before. You’d tell us on the way?”
“Rose has a plan,” I said.
“Pretty much the same thing. Explain.”
“I think Johannes might be resisting. In another part, I’m wondering if the Barber is struggling in the same way Rose and I are.”
“Struggling?” Mags asked.
“Possession can be parasitism and it can be symbiosis. The Barber is incredibly powerful, while Johannes isn’t strong enough to hold his own. What if Johannes isn’t maintaining a degree of control through strength of will alone? What if the Barber is letting him win?”
“Why?” Mags asked. Where I had more stamina, she struggled to run up stairs and communicate in more than a few words at a time.
“Because if the Barber wins, absolutely and completely, then Johannes is broken and gone. Useless, for what the Barber wants to accomplish. The demesne belongs to Johannes. If we can break that connection, or if the Barber breaks the connection by being too rough with his meat puppet or metaphysical control over this place, we can stop it from accomplishing its goal.”
“And we can do that by killing Johannes?”
“We can, but it won’t be that easy. Knocking down the tower won’t be that easy, either. But think about it. The tower is empty. Why? There’s a reason, clearly. If Lola and Ainsley were in fighting shape, and if I felt more confident about letting the kids try and survive on their own, I’d almost suggest opening the door and trying to bait the wretches inside.”
“It would weaken the hold,” Paige said. “The Barber’s power inside, the places becomes less Johannes.”
“We’re playing king of the hill,” Mags said.
“King of the hill,” I agreed. “We need to weaken his hold on this place. Knock him off the hill. How ready are you? How much firepower do you have left?”
“Some,” Paige said. “I burned a lot. I’m worried I’m draining more from Isadora than she can give, but… I think she’d want me to.”
I nodded.
“I have some goblins,” Mags said. “Need more open area. They’re not fancy. Not top tier or even mid-list. But…”
“You have goblins.”
“Yeah.”
“And I’ve got two fists and chutzpah,” Peter said. “For all that’s worth.”
For all it was worth.
And I’ve got Rose, I thought. More of a double-edged sword than the Hyena.
Rose recognized the thought, and she seemed to acknowledge it.
I felt her rummaging, searching for something we could use.
I was running out of strength, drawing from a finite well. I was prepared to cede control, to simply let go and let Rose be Rose, and I knew that it might well be my last action.
But I’d do my damndest to put up a fight, all the same.
We reached the top of the stairs. Rose’s heart pounded as we crested the top, though the exertion was mine.
As battlefields went, it was terrifying. The tears the Gatekeeper had opened surrounded us. Against a backdrop of the great spheres, they were akin to magnifying glasses. Opening ways that reached to distant places.
To the great sphere which was covered in teeming masses, giving me a close-up of the shapes there. Lesser demons, crawling and clambering over one another.
To the sphere of fire and ruin, where the tracks and trails of the magma’s glow wrote out something that could have been an alien circuit board, a pattern that seemed to speak to my gut, promising nothing good.
A third and fourth pointed to darkness, and it went a step beyond even the darkness that Rose had feared would lift her off her feet. It drew away and ate at afterimages of light that danced across the eyes, making even fleeting glances feel like they were giving something to those places and that those places would never give it back.
Atop the large tower top was the opposition. Faysal was at the back, wearing a gatekeeper’s form, a fractal and abstract image of wings and white fur and an artificial ivory flesh, glowing with light that trailed off and away, oddly small and weak in comparison to the darkness that surrounded it.
The dragon framed it, wings furled. Bifurcated, nearly cut in half, but not quite, much of what I saw was the cross section of a dragon’s internals, elemental energies and white-hot scaled flesh bleeding heat and energy into the air, framing the sorcerer.
The sorcerer sat on the throne that Johannes had been sitting in when I’d first seen him, in my visions of Jacob’s Bell. One half of the dragon’s head was to his left, one half to the right. One of his leg was propped up on the seat, his arm resting on a knee. The shears dangled carelessly from his fingers.
There was no light in his eyes, as he stared at me. He didn’t blink, though the dragon did, before snorting a bit of smoke from its nostrils.
Right, I thought. Just have to unseat the king from his hill.
Which doesn’t actually win us the fight. It only helps.
“Fuck,” Mags said.
16.10