When they drew near he extended a hand and a wide net of sticky shadows shot from his fingers. The devils, too big to maneuver deftly, could not avoid the dark strands. It caught up all of them, wrapping their bodies and wings in sticky fibers of reified shadow.
Wings fouled, the devils roared and fell out of the sky. As they plummeted, Riven stepped through the darkness and onto one of the devil’s backs. He drove his sabers into the base of the devil’s skull, silencing its roars, then stepped to another, did the same, stepped to another, killed again. He killed six and stepped away before they hit the ground, their huge forms crushing lesser devils and throwing up clods of soil and grass.
Around him the battle raged. Devils and the dark hordes of the Shadowfell moaned, shouted, and died. Shadows spun around Riven. A green beam of energy and a column of hellfire shot out at him from his left, struck the shadows that shrouded him, and died in their darkness. He pointed a hand, loosed a line of life-draining energy from his palm, and withered an entire line of flaming devils and their mounts. They squirmed and shrieked and slowly imploded as his power stripped them of animus.
He’d killed dozens of devils and done nothing to cloak his power, but still Mephistopheles had not shown.
“Let’s try this, then,” Riven said.
Spinning and whirling his way through a score of gelugons, his sabers leaving a flotsam of insectoid limbs and heads behind him, he scanned the field for his target. He spotted him in moments, a pit fiend named Belagon, one of Mephistopheles’s most powerful generals. Flames and smoke sheathed the heavily armored pit fiend the same way shadows shrouded Riven. The devil stood several times the height of a man, and his blazing sword and flaming whip slew undead by twos and threes with each blow.
Riven stepped through the shadows to stand before him.
“Godling,” said the fiend. He beat his huge wings and they shed enough smoke and flame to engulf a village. Riven stood in their midst, unharmed.
“Dead thing,” Riven answered, and launched himself at the fiend.
His sabers moved so fast they hummed, as he ducked, stabbed, slashed, and spun. Despite its size, the fiend answered in kind, its huge blade spitting flames as it parried, stabbed, and slashed. The two of them fought in a cloud of shadows and smoke and flame and power, and any devils or undead caught up in the cloud died screaming.
Belagon’s whip cracked as the fiend tried to wrap Riven’s legs in its flaming lines, but Riven leaped the attempt and slashed down with both sabers, severing the whip. He sidestepped a stab from Belagon’s sword, pointed both sabers at the fiend’s chest, and loosed a spiraling column of divine power. It slammed into the fiend, driving him backward several strides, tore through his breastplate, and tore a gory divot in the exposed flesh of his chest.
The fiend shouted with rage, the flames that surrounded him igniting into a conflagration. He charged Riven, blazing sword held high. Riven sidestepped the downward slash-the blade put a furrow in the earth-slid to the fiend’s side and drove both blades through his armor and into his abdomen.
The devil squealed and collapsed, writhing in pain, ichor spurting from his gut. Riven rode the shadows to his side and drove both his blades into his throat. The pit fiend gurgled and his flames died, as did the fiend. Riven crouched atop the dead pit fiend’s chest, an ichor-stained saber gripped in each fist, a cloud of shadows and smoke roiling around him.
“Come out, come out, whither you hide,” he said to Mephistopheles.
Vasen, Gerak, and Orsin watched the battle in awed silence. Magical energy and fire lit the otherwise dark air of the Shadowfell, criss-crossed the field in blazing lines and pillars and columns and streaks of killing force. The undead blanketed the diabolical forces, so many and so thick that it looked as if a black fog had settled on the fiendish legions. The sound of shouts and screams and drums and moans was surreal. Vasen tried to keep his eyes on Riven, but Riven moved from shadow to shadow so quickly, covering as much as a bowshot in a single stride, that it was impossible to keep up. But wherever he appeared, the one-eyed man-god left dead devils in his wake.
They watched Riven fight a pit fiend in a fog of shadows and smoke and fire, watched him fell the devil with as much effort as it would have taken a skilled warrior to disarm a child.
Orsin held his holy symbol in hand and muttered prayers under his breath.
Gerak and Vasen stood with their mouths hanging open, waiting for words to fly in and give them something to say.
A boom sounded, so loud it shook the doors of the Citadel of Shadow, and for a moment stilled the battle. A line of fire formed in the sky above the battlefield, a slit in the fabric of the planes. Smoke and heat and power poured from it, the screams of the damned. The line extended laterally, then vertically, until it looked as if a flaming door hung suspended in the air over the slaughter.
A shadow filled the door, a towering dark figure of muscle and wings and horns and power.
“Mephistopheles,” Vasen breathed.
Across the battlefield, Vasen saw Riven’s face turned not toward the archdevil but toward the Citadel, toward them. Riven gestured and the darkness around the three companions intensified, fat ropes of shadow swirling around them. Vasen, sweating shadows of his own, closed his eyes, offered a hasty prayer to Amaunator, then snapped them open.
“Ready yourselves,” he said. “We go.”
The shadows engulfed them entirely. Not even Vasen’s shade-born vision could pierce them. He felt a tingle in his stomach and a lurch as of rapid motion.
Chapter Fourteen
Riven watched Mephistopheles hurtle out of the portal, a dark bird of prey, the archdevil’s body surrounded by dark energy that crackled with each beat of his wings. The bare-chested, muscular archfiend eschewed any visible weapon or armor.
The devils on the ground roared excitedly at his appearance. A dozen shock troop devils, larger than those Riven had felled earlier, swooped toward their master. Mephistopheles hung in the air and surveyed the battle. His eyes fell on Riven.
“Let’s dance,” Riven said, bouncing on the balls of his feet.
The archfiend and the shock troop devils beat their wings and flew toward Riven like shot arrows. Riven surrounded himself in a protective cloud of shadows, rode the darkness into the air, and materialized to the side of the archfiend, slashing and stabbing the moment he appeared.
Mephistopheles anticipated his sudden appearance and pulled up, parrying Riven’s blades with his bare hands and arms, which might as well have been adamantine. Riven’s blades bounced off the archfiend’s skin, barely scoring the flesh. The devil’s fists and claws glittered with green energy as he punched, clawed, and grabbed at Riven. Green beams of power shot from the archdevil’s eyes, vied with Riven’s protective shadows.
Riven channeled more power into his blades, moved from shadow to shadow around the archfiend, appearing to Mephistopheles’s right, slashing, disappearing and reappearing to his left, stabbing, throughout dodging the blows of the archfiend and the shock troop devils who flew around the combat and tried to get in slashes when they could.
Riven opened a dozen tiny gashes in the archfiend. Finally Mephistopheles reached through his protective sheath of shadows and grabbed Riven by an arm. Riven did not relent in his attack, hacking with his saber, gouging the archfiend’s iron skin. Beams of viridian energy shot from Mephistopheles’s eyes but shattered into a rain of harmless motes when they struck the shadowy shroud that protected Riven.
Roaring in frustrated rage, Mephistopheles beat his wings, spun a tight circle in the air, and flung Riven earthward. But the moment the archfiend released Riven, he flipped in mid-air, extended a hand, and a long rope of shadow formed from the air of the Shadowfell, one end in Riven’s hand, the other looped around Mephistopheles’s throat. Riven’s precipitous fall pulled it taut, choked Mephistopheles, and swung Riven around and back up toward the archfiend. As the archdevil grabbed at the makeshift garrote wrapped around his throat, Riven slammed into him from behind, at the same time loosing two downward slashes that opened Mephistopheles’s flesh. Black ichor oozed from the gashes, and the archdevil raged.