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3.6 Rebirth of the Invigilation
🕑 Added 2024-11-12 11:57:23 +0000 UTCEd shook his head, trying to make sense of the scene in front of him. He was sitting down on hard ground, and a flabby, gray creature lay dead at his feet. It bled black blood that evaporated into what looked like steam or fog even as it poured out onto the ground.
“Great One! Ed! Can you walk?” hissed a familiar voice.
He blinked, and found the speaker, a familiar-looking imp, standing right behind the body. She wasn’t wearing her usual gray robes, but rather an odd, scaly loincloth and a belt with a few pouches hanging from it.
“Jori?” What the hells? Ed pushed himself up to his feet and looked around. He was in a stone cell, and the door was open. “What happened?”
“I killed the whisperer!” Jori said, as if that explained everything.
Ed grunted and patted at his robes, turning around to look for his pipe. Where had it gone? Jori tugged at his robes. “Come on. I have a way out. This place is the worst!”
The implications of the situation finally hit Ed as he shook off the last of his demonic jailor’s influence. “You’re bigger! What happened? And how did you get in here?”
Squinting down at the body, Ed kicked at it, rolling it over. It was naked except for a shoulder belt. A few odds and ends were tucked into it, but he was only interested in his pipe.
“We won! I killed Nuros’ host with my sorcery – by myself! Afterwards, the Solicitors wanted to deport me, because of the contract, but then they summoned me back. They wanted me to find you – I brought food!”
Ed’s stomach growled at the imp’s words, but he ignored it, pausing as he retrieved his pipe to stare at her. “You… what?” What did she mean they won?
He shook his head, clearing it. One thing at a time. “Never mind, tell me later. How do you expect to get out of here? I don’t imagine we’re going to get very far, running from a Demon King.”
He peeked out the door. The black stone corridor outside the cell was empty.
“I’m very sneaky!” Jori said proudly, pulling what looked like a tiny waterskin off of her belt. “They use these for money here. Usually it’s just little scraps, but I managed to get a whole one in there.” She grinned at him and winked conspiratorially. “They’re going to think you broke free, and that you and the guard killed each other!”
She popped the stopper from the skin and tipped it over. Silver mist poured out, swirling around and into itself oddly for a moment before it unfurled into the vague shape of a man – one missing an arm and the lower part of a leg. She’d brought a decoy soul?
“Jori,” he said with as much patience as he could muster. “That’s not going to work. Mortals leave corpses behind.”
“Yes, yes,” she said impatiently, tugging on his sleeve as she moved toward the door. “Don’t worry. I need your help with that part!”
He followed her into the corridor, gripping his pipe tightly in one hand as he did. How had Jori even made it in here without being caught? How bad was the security in this demon city?
Jori led him around the corner, and he nearly tripped over the bulky corpse of a demonic guard. The hellhound was large and probably weighed half again as much as he did. Looking closely, Ed realized that one of its eyes had been pierced through – probably by one of Jori’s claws. How had she gotten the drop on it?
The imp gestured at him impatiently. “Come on, help me get it back to your cell! It’s going to work great, just wait.”
Deciding to humor her for now, Ed seized the hound by one of its legs and dragged it back toward the cell. He looked over his shoulder every few seconds to make sure nobody was coming, but it looked like the demons really did have terrible security measures. Not even any wards, so far.
Back aching from the strain, he finally managed to haul the thing into the cell with Jori pushing from behind. She was bigger now, but it was still mostly a symbolic effort on her part. There was no chance she could have shifted the dead monster on her own. His stomach growled loudly and he felt weak from the strain and days without food and too little water. He sat down on the ground to catch his breath.
“Oh, right.” Jori said, responding to the sound as if he’d said something. She reached into a pouch at her belt and pulled out some kind of flaky-looking pie, which she held out to him.
“Try it,” Jori urged. “They’re great!”
Ed accepted the gift mechanically, staring from it back to Jori. Tentatively, he took a bite. It was filled with potatoes and stewed meat. Pork.
“Don’t look at me like that,” she said, frowning. “I told you I had food!”
She had said that. Somehow, Ed hadn’t really believed it, though. It wasn’t until he actually tasted it that it really hit him. His people were alive, and he had resupply.
He might not die here. Maybe. If they could make it out.
As he chewed, Jori summoned hellfire into her hand and began spattering it on the walls and the floor, scorching the stones and melting small marks into it. Then she began pouring more down on the floor around the creature’s head, deeply pitting the surface of the stone. Ed had to back up to keep her from setting his boots on fire.
“Alright, now I want you to smash its head!” Jori said, pointing at the hellhound. He could see what she was doing now, and he was cautiously impressed. The demons were supposed to think he’d broken free and killed the whisperer first. When the hellhound came to investigate he’d defeated it, but burned himself in the process, probably on the hound’s blood.
Not bothering with his focus, Ed flicked a magic missile down onto the hellhound’s corpse, crushing its head like a rotten pumpkin.
Hellfire ate through flesh like dry leaves, but it was still a stretch to think he’d managed to kill both of these demons and then burnt up without leaving any remains at all. But… with a damaged soul right there, and no other explanation, they might swallow it. Besides, the demons here might never have even seen a mortal die before. For a solo rescue-operation, it was pretty impressive.
Assuming, of course, that she actually had a way out of here.
“Not a bad idea.” he commented. Then, for good measure, he blew the cell door off its hinges.
Jori blinked up at him. “What was that for?”
“Don’t know if that hellhound could have opened the door by itself,” he explained, scowling down at the bodies. “I hope you have a way for us to get out of this place clean. This isn’t going to work if anybody sees us.”
“Of course I do! You aren’t going to like it, though.”
Ed scowled at her. “And why’s that?”
Jori grinned, and for once, Ed thought she looked like a real demon.
***
Torvald shifted nervously in his seat and glanced at the others arrayed around the table. They sat in a crowded room in the castle, dominated by a long table, with Count Narald at the head and representatives of the other temples placed along it in order of importance.
They were old men and women for the most part. High priests and paladins of renown. Behind the Count sat a handful of nobles, including Torvald’s own mother who watched the proceedings with narrowed eyes. She’d tried to talk him out of going this morning, and insisted on coming to observe the proceeding when she failed. And then there was Torvald, who sat just two seats down from Narald himself, next to Hannis of the Temple of Noruk.
He felt… out of place, to say the least.
He’d seen what the Duergar were capable of – he was one of just a few people in this room who had actually fought them. But to hear them seriously discuss the ramifications of the fall of Loamfurth – well, it hit home in a way that nothing else had, so far. What they feared, and what they were trying to address, wasn’t just a war against Besermark by a foreign country. They expected the Duergar to attempt to literally gobble up the entire country, and maybe their neighbors as well, just to fuel an even greater war against their own kind in the Depths.
It was too big to contemplate. Like Torvald, most of the priests at the table had kept their mouths shut for most of the meeting, leaving the discussion to the few who had received direction from the gods on the matter. Even now, Torvald could feel the presence of the goddess as a warmth deep in his chest. She did not speak to him or prompt him to action, but he could feel her attention like a hand resting on his shoulder.
It was a strange sensation, but it provided some comfort in an otherwise very unsettling situation.
Hannis was obviously trying to start a war with the greater Duergar empire while Angjou, the high priestess of Balarian, argued for temperance. The god of storms had a hot temper, but he was also the god of trade. War was bad for business, after all, and they didn’t have enough information yet to justify such a drastic action.
“If Noruk is calling his priests to the Sacral Peaks, we should join them,” Surin, the high priestess of Eyeli interjected, cutting off another tiresome statement from Hannis. “Let us all go to the peaks. We need neither armies, nor a declaration of war to act. The mandate of the Invigilation remains collectively ours, even if we haven’t used it in decades. This is what it’s for!”
The woman sat directly across from Torvald, next to Angjou, who grimaced at her words. The four of them sat closest to the Count because it was their gods – Noruk, Balarian, Eyeli and Ruzinia – who had stepped in the last time that greater demons were instrumentalized in the mortal world. They had appeared together personally to unmake them, tearing down the basis of the last Madurian Emperor’s power in the process.
A murmur rose around the room as the assembled priests and nobles considered what they’d just heard. Count Narald sat back in his chair, looking thoughtful. Hannis stared at Surin with narrowed eyes, no doubt trying to work out what she was up to.
The Invigilation, as it was called, was the mandate of their four temples to finish what their gods had started – to excise the threat of power-hungry warlocks and the monsters they sought to wield from the mortal world, and to keep them from reemerging again. They had waged a bloody, century-long war across the entire former empire, but what remained today was mostly symbolic. The temple priests still preached against the summoning of demons, but no one actually still went out to hunt warlocks – that was the Solicitors’ job.
For the most part, priests today remained in their temples, and their paladins pursued other goals. All of them except the Ruzinians, who continued to do what they’d always done – roaming the land to save those who called Her name. Still, Torvald doubted that even they had seriously pursued warlocks or demons in a century, at least.
“The temples alone cannot operate effectively against the Duergar Empire.” Hannis said finally, as if expecting a trap. “We don’t have the cooperation of their government – that means facing their armies.”
“That doesn’t mean we can’t get their cooperation.” Surin replied emphatically. “We don’t know that the larger Duergar Empire is even aware of this, or that they would stoop to similar tactics if pressed. I propose that we call a formal conclave at the Sacral Peaks to develop a unified strategy – one that represents not just Beseri interests, but the entire former empire, and that binds us all to act as one according to our mandate. That would benefit you, if it came to war, would it not?”
Hannis nodded begrudgingly, but Angjou scowled. “You’ll just drag everybody into a war that might not even affect us all. And that’s assuming the kingdoms even agree to it. Hell, even king Renias might see this as a challenge to his authority – threatening the ire of the gods to move his armies.”
Narald waved a hand dismissively. “Unlikely. Besermark is the only country that has already been assaulted, and our third largest city lies in ruins. Any outside support, be it from the gods or from our sister kingdoms, would likely be welcome to his majesty. We are already at war. As the high priestess of Eyeli said, the Invigilation was never truly ended. No king will openly defy the united will of the gods themselves.”
The high priestess of Balarian subsided, stymied by the lack of support, but then her eyes fell on Torvald.
“What about the Ruzinians? Are they prepared to support this?”
Torvald sat up straight as all eyes turned to him, and he began to sweat uncomfortably. He looked past the count to the nobles and met his mother’s eyes. There was fear in her eyes, and she shook her head at him urgently.
But he knew the answer, and he had to give it.
“The hands of the goddess will always appear where they are needed.”
Comments
Stephen Pearson
Thanks for the chapter! :-)
