Chapter 19
Fara recovered after only four days. The magic in her wound eventually faded enough that her healing technique worked, and she bounced back the next day. She gave Rys a cheeky smile when he asked if the wound scarred, but he knew he’d find out first-hand one day.
They dived into the Labyrinth the morning after Fara dueled Grigor and confirmed her return to good health.
Orthrus led the way, bobbing along. As always, he was visible only to Rys.
Grigor played rearguard again. But their numbers had swelled since Rys’s last visit, with the Ashen joining them. The Labyrinth responded in kind, creating larger rooms and corridors.
“On the one hand, it’s less claustrophobic,” Fara said as she watched the demons finish off a group of fire-breathing lizards. “But these larger rooms are full of traps and surprises. False walls, monsters hiding behind pillars, and constant ambushes.”
“Complain after some of you get hurt,” one of the Lilim said. “We’re so bored. And horny.”
Some of the demons overheard. Rys saw an odd expression cross their faces, and the demons looked at each other.
“The first few floors are always fairly safe,” Fara said. “It’s once we get to the fifth floor we need to be careful.”
Rys watched as the demons nodded to each other. None of them spoke, but he knew that they had formed some sort of plan.
When they arrived at the fifth floor, they found a crossroads again. This time, it had four paths but no undead dragons. Despite the lack of a real challenge, the demons put their plan into action.
The demons missed their swings and took return blows from the lizards. Sometimes they took more than one, allowing the monsters to find a chink in their armor.
“They’re getting sloppy,” Fara said.
They were, in more ways than one. The Lilim were thrilled.
Grigor wasn’t. He loomed over the offending demons, his axe gleaming. They stopped screwing around afterward.
“That cannot be a healthy way to heal someone,” Fara said, her face red.
“I thought you were fine with this sort of thing?” Rys asked as they began to descend even lower into the Labyrinth. The infernals were still more than strong enough to handle the challenge, and he needed to save his strength for real threats.
“There’s a difference between casual nudity and watching the Lilim suck somebody’s cock in public,” Fara said. “The same goes for Vallis’s crude jokes. You become desensitized to that sort of stuff when you spend decades in the mountains with the same people, day after day. Foolish things are said and done.”
“But not in public,” Rys said.
“Not unless they were very drunk,” Fara said. “And nobody ever let them forget it if they did.”
They descended rapidly. Orthrus never wavered, no matter how confusing the rooms became. Not even an entire floor full of identical rooms, each with eight exits, slowed him down.
Until they reached the ninth floor. A vault door stood at the far end of a large chamber. The rest of the chamber was filled by a huge pool of water. A timer written in an unfamiliar language slowly ticked down as the Ashen continuously heated the water, but it constantly reset itself.
While the demons hunted the endless supply of shark-beasts within the water, Rys poked and prodded at the runes. While he couldn’t read the runes, he recognized the magic connecting the runes to the door.
“Fara, can your disruption techniques affect the runes?” he asked.
She stared at him. “Those are runes?”
“Magical runes, yes. They control the door. I’ve seen similar mechanisms in the Infernal Empire, as well as some older ruins.” He frowned. That made him think.
“I might be able to,” Fara said. With a few swishes of her tails, she cast a spiritual technique.
The vault door hissed, then slid open with a boom.
Rys stepped through the door. What lay beyond it was completely different to every previous Labyrinth chamber.
A gargantuan cylinder had been carved out of dark granite, creating a cavernous room. Descending walkways spiraled around the length of the room’s interior wall. Steel doors of varying shapes and sizes dotted the walkways.
Rys looked over the edge of the closest walkway. The bottom was easily fifty stories down.
Had they left the Labyrinth?
More disturbingly, this room seemed familiar to Rys. He drew a blank when he tried to remember it, and not even Grigor recognized it, but something tugged at Rys’s memories.
A raised platform sat at the very bottom.
“The power conduit lies at the very bottom, beyond another door,” Orthrus explained. “Be wary. This room is a defense mechanism. Its form changes based on the people who trigger it.”
Naturally, Orthrus provided no real advice. Rys suspected the wisp would lose no sleep if he failed.
Reaching out magically, Rys made his first useful discovery. The walls were loaded with infernal and dwarven runes.
“Look alive, people,” Rys said. “Unless I’m wrong, this is some sort of dwarven fortress. No other race builds stuff this massive within rock. That means it’s built to favor a bunch of stubby bastards in heavy armor who know their way around the business end of a pike.”
“Close-quarters combat, limited maneuverability, restricted ranged and magic support, and no ability to use numbers to our advantage,” Grigor summarized.
“Yup. But the place is also full of wards. Infernal ones, too.” Rys frowned. “Dunno why. Maybe this is based on a dwarven fortress from the Infernal Empire.”
“There are many to use,” Grigor said. “Perhaps that is why it is familiar to you?”
Maybe, but Rys remembered all of them. Dwarven citadels were some of the most majestic creations in existence. Digging out mountains and underground chasms required serious dedication. The dwarves did insane shit like building upside down ziggurats off cave ceilings. Then they lived in them and laughed at people who suggested it was unsafe to do so.
“I can’t sense a thing,” Fara complained. “Is that normal? The walls are so full of magic that everything else is just noise.”
“Dwarves can’t use much magic other than rune-crafting, so they rely heavily on wards that counter it,” Rys explained. “We’re going in blind, and presumably can’t rely on knocking down any walls or doors.”
The demons formed up in formation next to both of the walkways that led down. Nobody saw anything farther down, but that didn’t mean anything. For all they knew, the wards also affected long-distance vision.
“Taras, I need you and the Malakin to head down and search for any signs of enemies,” he ordered.
The Malakin nodded in response. A pause. Rys glared at the devil, as if daring him to correct Rys’s pronunciation of his name.
Without saying anything else, the Malakin vanished.
Then the air whispered, “It’s Tarasu.”
“That bastard,” Rys said. “Do I need to engrave his name on his head or something?”
“I think that’d be cruel and unusual punishment,” Fara said. “It’s a vowel, Rys. Why does it matter?”
He looked around. Nobody was paying attention to him.
“It doesn’t. But it’s fun to mess with him,” he admitted.
Fara stared at him for several long seconds. “You really need to get out of the castle more.”
Nothing happened for the next few minutes. Taras didn’t communicate using mindspeak, so Rys assumed he spotted nothing too dangerous.
But he found himself wishing he had some flying demons or devils. True succubi possessed a flying Gift, although the most use it usually got was for bedroom kinks. Most flying infernals were fairly weak, as the ability was a racial trait rather than a Gift for almost all races. And what kind of idiot asked a succubus for their flying Gift instead of one of their mental manipulation Gifts?
Rys tried not to think about the fact he had a translation Gift from a powerful succubus. Infernals could only give one Gift to another person. If he’d thought ahead, Rys could have easily bullied Asa into giving him one of her mental manipulation Gifts.
“Dwarves,” Taras reported back. “They only become visible when we got close, and they are lingering on the lower levels, but there are a lot of them.”
“Define ‘a lot,’” Rys asked.
“Hundreds. Heavily armored. Most are carrying a mixture of hammers, axes, and pickaxes. There is a large contingent of crossbowmen. Some runic weapons.” Taras frowned.
“Anything else?” Rys asked. “Rune-knights? Bombardiers? Battlemages?”
“They carried banners, my lord,” Taras said, before describing what was on them.
Grigor and Rys looked at each other in grim surprise.
“Turranem,” Grigor uttered. “But this place does not resemble any chamber within that citadel that I know of.”
“I don’t think it’s supposed to,” Rys said. He bit his lip. “The Labyrinth distorts space and summons monsters. That’s been our belief so far. But we’ve been wrong.”
Fara looked between the two of them in confusion. “What is a ‘Turranem?’”
“The Turranem Mountains contains—contained, I guess—the largest dwarven citadel in northern Gauron,” Rys explained. “It took serious damage during the Cataclysm and its economy suffered. Furious with the Empire, the dwarves rebelled en masse and joined the angels.”
“I had only just enlisted,” Grigor said. “The war against the angels was entering its final stretches. I saw countless veterans fall when we cleansed the rebels from the depths of the mountains.”
“War against the angels? I thought this happened after the Cataclysm,” Fara asked.
“The Cataclysm ended with the destruction of the continent of Pandemonium,” Rys said. “But the war between the Infernal Empire and the angels continued for another century. Ariel and Malusian didn’t forgive the angels for attacking them. The angels said it was an attempt to stop the war from worsening, but nobody cared.”
“Many survivors from the Cataclysm met their end there. The recruiting age in Hell was drastically lowered.” Grigor crossed his arms and looked up at the ceiling. “As terrible as it was, without it, I would never have met Rys. I am thankful for that.”
“Well, I rose to power for the same reason,” Rys said. “I was even the one who had to negotiate the final peace treaty, after we drove the angels back to their last fortress but couldn’t oust them.”
Ancient history. For Grigor, they were describing events long past. Even for Rys they had happened long ago. At the start of the war, he was given his first independent command, separate from Lacrissa. At the end of it, Malusian gave him a fortress and treated Rys as one of his trusted generals.
“As I said earlier, we’ve made the wrong assumption about the Labyrinth so far. It can create a lot more than bizarre monstrosities. These dwarves feel ripped from our memories,” Rys said.
“Rys, what is this place?” Fara asked.
He grimaced.
Orthrus had said that this room was part of the defense mechanism for the power conduit. That meant the seal was actively defending itself.
The most likely explanation was that the seal used its connection to Rys to summon the dwarves. There was no way that somebody set this chamber up in advance. What if somebody stumbled in here by accident?
Maybe not by accident, Rys admitted. The vault door made for good security. But any decently talented group of mystic foxes could penetrate this deep. A bunch of dwarves couldn’t stop them, given what he’d seen of Fara. Rys knew there was a village of foxes in the northern regions of Kavolara. That was a strong possibility.
“It’s the defense system for what I’m looking for,” he said after several long seconds of deliberation. “Grigor, you know how to handle this. I don’t think the dwarves will be too dangerous.”
Grigor nodded and barked out orders. The demons hurried into formation and began their descent.
“The Lilim will be necessary to heal any crossbow wounds, but this location favors us,” Grigor rumbled as they walked. “The walls are too far from each side for any crossbow to fire across. I suspect this place was intended to be defended by other means.”
How fortunate for Rys.
Horns sounded when they got deep enough. Their descent had been calm enough, with no ambushes.
Dense formations of steel-clad dwarves met the demons on the walkways. Runic weapons met as the demons crashed into the front of the enemy formation.
The demons scythed through the dwarves, but their injuries rapidly slowed them down. More and more dwarves thundered forth to meet them. While the equipment of the Turranem rebels had been excellent, they had been civilians.
Angry rebels provided numbers but little skill. Many of their hammer and axe blows missed the veteran demons, whose own weapons cleaved the dwarves apart on the return blow.
But as with the Labyrinth monsters, these dwarves knew no fear. Their eyes held no pupils and the only noises they made were guttural screeches of pain and fury. The demons hurled their corpses off the walkway. When they finally got close enough to the bottom, the corpse piles became visible.
The noble demons rotated the weaker demons out under Grigor’s watchful eye. The Lilim took wounded demons into side-rooms and gave them a quickie to bring them up to fighting strength. Then the demons threw themselves back into the fray.
Rys knew this came with a cost. Lilim healing magic favored longer sessions and the dwarves used runic weapons that countered regeneration. The rapid healing Gift used by the Lilim was closer to a burst of adrenaline and a bandage over the wound, rather than proper healing. Only once the battle was over could they take a break and let the Lilim truly bring the demons back up to fighting strength.
“This feels like one of the silliest battles I’ve been in,” Fara said. Her tails shifted, and she knocked a squad of dwarves off the edge using a sweep of force. “I can hear the Lilim behind me.”
“It’s working, isn’t it?” Rys grunted as he summoned a wall of flame to their side.
A volley of crossbow bolts disintegrated before reaching them. A hundred dwarves stood around the circular platform at the bottom, rapidly reloading their crossbows.
Rys considered himself fortunate that those weren’t repeater crossbows. His inferno vanished into prismatic light moments later.
They had finally gotten close enough to the bottom that the dwarves could reach them with their crossbows. That was both good and bad.
Bad, because every crossbow was loaded with a runic bolt. If a demon took a few of those, then he’d be down for the count. Maybe even banished.
But it was good because if the dwarves could reach them, they could reach the dwarves.
“Grigor, I’m heading down,” Rys said. “Fara, I’ll be relying on your force barriers to stop any more volleys.”
He plucked his axe from his belt and pumped energy into his body. Heat seared his veins as his muscles strengthened due to his infernal sorcery.
Rys leaped from the walkway. The crossbowmen didn’t react and instead continued reloading as he fell. Hellfire flickered around the edges of Rys’s axe, which glowed with an eerie black light.
Axe raised, Rys landed in the midst of their formation. He brought the axe down on the ground as the dwarves scattered. A great inferno of hellfire exploded around him, centered on the axe. Scorching, blood red flames turned dozens of dwarves into prismatic light. The screams stopped within moments.
Then the spell ceased, and Rys was surrounded by dozens of dwarves with loaded crossbows. They pointed them at him and fired as one.
Seriously? Had dwarves always been this stupid?
Rys leaped up into the air before the twang of the crossbows reached his ears. Screeches rose from the dwarf-like monsters summoned by the Labyrinth. After he landed, Rys began to cut through the surrounding dwarves. His Gift-enhanced axe carved them apart with ease.
Ripples of hellfire rose up among the remaining dwarves, and Rys looked up. The Ashen stood on the edge of the walkway, hurling balls of hellfire into the fray. Margrim wasn’t present, as he was on the surface while Grigor was busy down here, but the Ashen deftly avoided hitting Rys.
Within a few short minutes, the remaining dwarves were dealt with. Rys ordered the Lilim to take care of the injured while everybody else rested.
“There it is. Our objective,” Orthrus uttered.
An arched door stood at one end of the bottom story, recessed deeply into the wall. It hadn’t been built for humans, given it towered above even Grigor and could comfortably fit a dozen people through it at once. A huge golden rune gleamed on the front of the door, and more surrounded it on all sides. No handle was visible.
Beyond that door lay one of the power conduits. Rys prepared to take his first step to break the seals that kept him here.