Lightning flashed again in the depths of the roiling cloud. The cloud now filled the room, and in its core was a mounting fire condensing in a roughly human shape. Out of the constant shaking, seemingly out of the earth beneath the temple, an immense moan grew, swelling into thunder. A beam cracked loose from the ceiling, began to pivot down into the vortex, and burst spontaneously into flame. Ice had been congealing on the walls; one roof-hanging icicle that had been growing with incredible speed directly out of the air exploded in a billow of steam. A feeling of dread filled the room.
In the heart of the fire, a Presence began to form.
Max abruptly decided he’d better change tack - he’d never be able to actually get the Death back in the ring, not at this stage, not the way things were going; the only thing he might be able to do was control the damage. The Death was manifesting in an attitude of extreme vexation, a very, very dangerous condition indeed. The coupling spell split again into its swarm of tiny modules and descended toward an ornamental skull on the desk as Max reached out for the quiescence sequence of his programmed spell-chain; maybe that could calm the Death down, help him instantiate normally, instead of -
A fireball pulsed through the vortex, the outer layers of cloud and all the ice on the walls vaporized in a sudden fog of dark steam, pieces of roof hurtled upward into the night, coils of force gathered, and the Presence reached out. Max, flying again through the air caught in the force of the vortex, hit the wall, bounced off, hit another wall, and fell to the floor. Something burned on his chest - his amulet! Silver lights were racing across its surface. The tiny sapphires and the few larger stones and the big ruby had come ablaze with color and were blasting twining shafts of energy back out at the vortex. Now, that’s interesting, Max thought. And then the Presence noticed him.
Max felt the flail of its attention shift in his direction. This manifestation of the Death had become an essence consumed with frenzied rage and moderated by only the barest trace of sentience. As Max opened his mouth for a last-ditch word of power, the thing lashed out at him with fire. The flame struck the energy shaft from Max’s amulet.
A crack of massive thunder! - a titanic flash of red! - the flame broke against the field of the amulet and curled off to the sides (like a water wave crashing around the prow of a boat) and the impact of colliding fields smashed Max backward as the wall disintegrated around him, but Max himself was impossibly unscathed, well, quite a bit singed actually yet certainly alive; Max twisted (now in mid-air), saw a split-second image of onrushing floor and cowering guards, the floor came up as it spun down to its proper place, and Max collided with it on one foot and fell to the other knee in a crouch. A pile of smoldering wreckage dropped on his back. He shook his head and forced himself back to his feet, fragments of wood panel cascading off him onto the floor.
The rubble had also fallen on the Guardsmen he noticed next to him, but true to form they had already spotted him and decided he was someone worthwhile to attack and were converging on him with their swords. And, also true to form, his own rapier was buried somewhere in the ruin of the upper room.
“Max!” said the voice of Zalzyn Shaa.
Max whipped his gaze up and saw a sword spinning toward him above the heads of the soldiers. He ducked under the lunge of the first man, straightened up with his left shoulder in the guy’s stomach, lifting him off his feet and throwing him backward into the man just behind him, jabbed the elbow of his other arm into the breastbone of another soldier at his back on the opposite side, got his left hand on top of the head of a fourth soldier, and used that as a grip to help fling himself into the air. The flying sword slapped into his right hand outstretched above the clamor.
His other hand was still on the head of the soldier he’d used as a vaulting-pole. Max pushed off clockwise as he reached the top of his leap and began to descend. His new sword traced a downward spiral path, looping gracefully but with remarkable speed around the lunges and guards and attempted slashes of the troopers, leaving a neat trail of red outlined across their torsos. The troopers fell, Max began another leap over their declining heads in the direction of Shaa’s voice, and -
A large fireball burst out of the mezzanine workroom and paused overhead, trailing orange jets like the tail of a comet. Waves of terrible heat slammed out, the beams and the wall and the ceiling around it exploding into flaming ash. Within the blaze of plasma, crude features appeared, a pair of jagged eyes and a red savage mouth. Max whipped his head in and wrapped himself into a ball as the mouth curled into a sneer. The lips parted.
A scorching wind smashed into Max with the force of a lead hammer and drove him into the floor, except the floor itself had already blown through from the pressure and was tumbling into the basement. Something caught at Max’s side, debris pelted him and scraped him loose, he plunged again, and as he opened one eye and got a glance off under his arm (still in his tucked position with his head sunk onto his chest and his arms wrapped around his head) he hit bottom, slid two feet along an embankment, rolled over an edge sharp with pointy stones, and plopped into a stream of steaming water. Disgusting water - the blast had broken through the foundation all the way into the sewer under the temple. Flaming pieces of the temple floor were striking all around, raising a constant fountain of water that vaporized in the hot air. Max got his nose out of the water to breathe, trying to assess his health and collect his thoughts, but then with another massive rumble a new mound of debris appeared overhead, silhouetted against the yellow storm of flames in the building above, the pile of debris (surely an entire wall at least) expanded in his vision and grew huge, and then the stuff dropped full along the line of the open sewer.
Max’s personal protection field had done pretty well for him so far - it couldn’t ward off everything, but it did mean he was only bruised and bloody and in moderate pain rather than totally pulped. How it would fare against the equivalent of a major avalanche, though … As fast as he could, Max spoke a preconjured word reserved for significant emergency. Energy drained from his body and slammed into his shield as the rubble descended. The flaming avalanche caught him and threw him into the sewer wall, crushing him into the stones, and then the weight and the force were dragging him down, down beneath the level of the water, down to the bottom of the sewer bed, down into the muck, mashing the air from his lungs, pinning him to the rock without a hope of movement. Dimly, through the rushing in his head, he heard the roar of the Death far above. His awareness began to ebb.
Max tried to concentrate - surely there was still some way out! - but all his mind would focus on was the mess he had left up above. The process of recorporation had gone about as badly as it possibly could. Instead of having all the Death’s personality elements instantiate in concert together, the component of wrath and rage had seized control, with all the power of a Death at its disposal. There was no intelligence there now, and the only consciousness was the desire to destroy. Such cases were occasionally mentioned in the texts: the Frozen Dunes covering a hundred square miles on the southern hemisphere continent of Zinartica where a city-state had once stood were supposedly the result of one of them.
The situation was bad, it was very, very bad. They were dealing with a mad god. And the man upstairs on the firing line was Shaa.
Shaa raised his arms. This was exactly the kind of mess he tried to keep himself out of; it would cost him, there was no doubt about that, the only question was how much. Again, the curse, Shaa thought, that damnable curse.