Tallah

How long was the day in this blasted place?

It has been twenty bells since you’ve pulled me from the work, Bianca noted.

Counting rest and the first incursion into the city, Tallah wondered if the place would ever sleep. Part of her wished it wouldn’t. Not that the dark would be so much worse by itself, but she didn’t relish the idea of more hidden darkness to hold Rhine’s wraith in waiting.

Even now, the thing glared at her from across the platform, half-hidden by the tatters of a curtain.

“Tallah?”

Her attention snapped back to the moment, and she looked at Ludwig. He’d been speaking and she’d not been listening.

“Yes?”

“What are those?” he repeated his question and gestured with a piece of dried meat at one of her fireflies. Judging by Sil’s worried look, he’d probably asked several times.

“Fireflies.”

“Are they miniature fireballs? No, that wouldn’t be it. Nothing caught fire when you used one.”

“It’s just a compressed mote of power. Mostly defensive.”

Ludwig chewed thoughtfully, staring at a firefly that drifted close-by. “Very creative effect. Not fire, so it doesn’t cluster together. And I see that they’re quite efficient. How do you control them?”

“Carefully.”

Not an answer that sufficed but her attention was on other matters. Rhine moved. The wraith walked forward from its waiting place, looking about as if lost.

A lull came in the whispering annoyance. Silence crashed over them with the depth of the sea. Tallah hackles rose and she dropped the food. Sil looked around wildly, gripping her staff. At a sign, Vergil was on his feet, axe and sword in hands, grunting in Horvath’s unmistakable droll.

The silence stretched. If she strained, the sound of distant water falling into the abyss would carry over, as would the hiss and whistle of zephyrs wafting through unseen ventilation shafts. But the crying was gone, as were all of the assorted little companion whispers. Without them, Grefe was a truly dead place.

Any moment now.

“You… You?”

The voice boomed in the all-engulfing silence, its echoes spreading far. A young girl’s shrill voice, laden with loathing and incredulous fury.

Gone were the whispers. Gone was the bright light. It all began to dim, like a cloud passing over a perfectly nice day, darkening by the moment.

Tallah glanced at the nearest spire. Shapes converged upon it, black eight-legged bodies crowding together to strangle the light. Tens of them, large and misshapen.

It came again. Louder. “You?! You should never have returned here!”

“I believe this place remembers you, old man. It doesn’t seem to want you back.” Tallah tried to make light of the situation, but the light disappearing sent shivers down her back, a trickle of cold sweat turning her skin to gooseflesh.

The accusing words moved and clustered, a hundred throats speaking from the lengthening black shadows to form an unintelligible gibbering.

Vergil hunched low by the edge of the platform, axe in one hand, sword in the other. He let out a low growl as if smelling the threat on the air.

A girl walked out of the shadows as if birthed by them. A frail, naked, raven-haired thing, emaciated to the point of skeletal, she walked with an odd, stumbling gait. Bright eyes shone beneath a mess of wispy hair tangled up with webs.

An accusing finger pointed at Ludwig.

“You came back to see what your treachery has wrought?” she asked with a voice that echoed unnaturally throughout the shadows.

Sil drew close against Tallah’s back and Vergil barred the girl’s way towards Ludwig. They stared at one another in defiant silence.

His axe flashed in a perfect arc and the girl’s head burst into pieces. Ludwig screamed and collapsed, brought out of his stupor by the violence. Vergil swung again but the corpse moved back with unnatural speed, breaking apart even as it ran. Flesh hardened into chitin, limbs split into clawed multi-jointed legs, and a white spider bled bright-red ichor as it limped away from the possessed boy.

A gasp from Sil had Tallah turning around and swinging her own sword. It clanked against the claws of a black spider as tall as she, stopping a killing blow as Sil swung her staff at it to no effect.

Unleash me, Bianca urged.

Two things happened at once. Tallah pulled Sil out of the way of the monster rearing for a second blow and a kinetic burst blasted the thing back into the abyss.

More skittered over the edge, a veritable tide of claws and black armoured bodies, all screaming with the girl’s voice.

Sil’s sprite went up to show the beasts pouring in. She dragged Ludwig to his feet and encased both of them behind invisible walls.

Good. Even panicked, her training and experience shone past the terror. Tallah put Sil out of mind for the time being and motioned for Vergil next to her.

“Break them,” she ordered.

A growl answered her command as Vergil threw himself into the melee, howling with bloodlust.

Bianca anchored her to the stone and thrust her kinesis forward in a sweeping heave.

Spiders staggered. Tallah stepped in with her blade, its heated edge backed by Bianca’s kinetic push, cutting clean through the first beast that lunged. Ichor boiled, erupting into foul steam as she carved it in two.

Vergil kicked at a rearing spider as tall as he, smashed in its eyes with the back of his axe, and ran it through with his sword. Tallah felt the wind of his movement in her blind side. His roar of joy mingled with the ghost wail of a spider dying to his axe.

Another kinetic push and stagger, another creature cleaved in two, legs cut off and twitching on the floor. Vergil took out one more, and another. He was everywhere at her flanks, slashing, clubbing, kicking and punching. Whispers of his axe passed by her ear more than once and the crunch of its bite drew out more death screams from creatures Tallah was too slow to see.

Shapes and shadows bled into one another as the spiders kept coming. No matter how many she threw off the platform they would not stop. All of them ignored her as they made for Sil and Ludwig. Firefly after firefly flew and popped in eyes and joints, showering them all in sticky gore. As quick as she and Christina could make them, it wasn’t enough to even staunch the tide.

Tallah took a risk. She threw Vergil forward into the flow and bought herself heartbeats to weave. He more than relished the overwhelming odds.

“Blasted things.” She wove illum tightly around her fingers and focused her anger as a magnifying glass. “Bugger off.”

The first heat lance punched through a whole line of spiders. They screamed in unison as they died. She took careful aim and fired off again, killed and immediately drew back the heat before fire could spread. Dying wails filled the air and the tide’s attention turned to her. A sweep of her hand turned an entire wave into screaming husks. Vergil ducked and sprawled on his stomach to launch himself forward again the moment the scream returned.

“Behind you!” Sil screamed.

Tallah was too slow to react and got dragged down by one unseen. It clawed and bit at her, too many legs everywhere seeking for a gap in her armour and her defence.

Sil’s wail cut through the chaos.

Tallah got a glimpse as she was pulled down atop the creature. White spiders swarmed the healer, passing right through her barriers. Sil batted at them with her staff to no effect.

Heat washed down Tallah’s sides. Blood gushed from a wound that suddenly occupied her entire attention. She laboured to rise to her feet.

Vergil kicked the spider off her. He too was bloodied and yelling ragged rallying cries in his odd language. Spiders rushed them. It was all Tallah could do to find her feet in the maelstrom, to fire off another heat lance. Something raged in the corner of her vision.

A spider leapt from the throng, ablaze in phosphorous-white heat. The old man! That old fool threw fireballs at the encroaching beasts. Webs caught the flame and burned in a burst of light, heat and smoke choking the air with their foulness.

The old fool’s going to kill us all, Bianca complained.

Fire encircled them and raced across the webs. Sil screamed again and Tallah spared a worried glance at her friend. The white spiders were upon her, clawing at her feet, trying to drag her down into the web.

She couldn’t see Ludwig in the chaos.

Vergil clambered over the still twitching husks that piled around them and threw himself forward, axe and blade swinging down with methodical brutality. He smashed into one of Sil’s barriers and let out a stream of invective as he pounded on it.

Pay attention, please. Bianca finally got her airborne and in a heartbeat Tallah had a better look of their odds.

They were terrible.

The webs around the platform were black with shapes, some on fire, most just marching grimly towards the focus of their fury. A mound of bodies signalled where Ludwig fought for his life.

What she needed was to get them all away from the platform and gain breathing room before the smoke choked them. Her aerum vial was at her hip but it wouldn’t do her any good in this chaos of fighting.

Vergil had found his way to Sil’s side, a storm of violence that cleaved anything that neared the reach of his weapons. His clothes and the webs on them were stained red with blood. He wouldn’t last much longer either.

Brace, Bianca ordered. She did. Her muscles bunched painfully as a complex weave formed around her, lashing her to the platform and its statues. With a mental heave, Bianca pulled with all her strength on the nearest column, yanking it with a deafening crash from its socket. A tonne of stone if not more, it floated up into the air, its shadow staggering the spiders’ advance.

Tallah, in the centre of the web of power, was pulled apart by the titanic forces Bianca commanded. Just holding the damned thing in the air flooded her mind with endless alien equations that made her head spin.

Bianca slammed the column into the platform with the force and grace of a meteor. It crushed bodies to paste and sheared clear through one side of the structure. Statues and platform tumbled together into the web beneath, ripped through, and fell into the abyss. A rain of black bodies followed.

The cloud of dust kicked up was thick as smoke and stung Tallah’s eyes and throat. She gracelessly fell back into the melee, Bianca rallying to draw in more power after the effort. For now she would rely on her sword arm. In the new chaos, she fought by feel and remembered sight. Spiders reared up to her and she burned them, risking more and more as she tried to reach Sil. Rhine was at her side, silent in her haunting, a spider coming into every spot she manifested.

Underfoot, the platform shifted and teetered dangerously, still held up by is supports, but damaged enough that it would sway and crack, its edges crumbling away. She nearly lost her footing as another spider clambered up her side to try a fresh bite. It didn’t the get a chance as her sword plunged through an eye and punched out the other side.

“Sil! Where are you?” she called out.

Dust choked her breath and smoke brought tears into her eyes.

A scream answered, but far to the side and away from the direction she’d been fighting in. Bugger! She stumbled when clambering over a corpse, a hand grasping at her trousers. Ludwig reached out from beneath a dead monster, eyes white with shock and fear. She hauled him from beneath the crushing weight and stabbed behind him at the spider that tried biting into the old fool.

No time to berate him for his actions now. She prodded Bianca and was answered by a weary sigh. One last, powerful push and then the ghost would be as useless to her as Christina.

She took the chance. The force of the push radiating outward blasted away the dust and smoke and any spiders that still clung to the edges of the crumbling platform. Flames sputtered out and light blinded her for a moment.

Sil and Vergil were nowhere in sight.