Chapter 599: A Retrospection of Magic Power
By afternoon Roland had the expedition assembled and moving.
Equipment: a tent, rations for five days, and one concrete paddle steamer. Devil’s Town was coastal, which meant the route ran through Shallow Beach. Hummingbird handled the boat.
This was always a strange thing to watch. Hummingbird was, in most respects, physically indistinguishable from Nana — compact, gentle-looking, easy to underestimate. When she pressed her palms flat against the concrete hull and the boat lifted, she looked like an illustration from a fable about impossible tasks. He had read somewhere that ants could move ten times their body weight. Hummingbird managed something closer to five hundred times hers, and looked mildly inconvenienced by the exertion.
She had refined the technique since her early attempts. Rather than spending magic power reducing each item’s weight individually, she kept contact with the object and reduced the weight of the whole thing continuously. The drawback was that she had to maintain physical contact, which meant she followed the boat rather than the boat following anyone’s lead — a minor awkwardness in logistics, and easily accounted for.
The paddle steamer moved west along endless mountain ridges, arrived at Rocky Beach two days later, and put Roland on solid ground for the first time since he had surveyed the demon camp from the air aboard Cloud Gazer.
What he had seen from altitude had been: dark terrain, unusual density, no vegetation. What he stood in now was genuinely strange.
Rocky Beach was desolate in the particular way of places that have been made dead deliberately, rather than simply never having lived. Across the gravel and crushed stone, animal remains were layered into the substrate — some already fused into new rock, others in the process of becoming it. A few bones, large enough that Roland couldn’t assign them to any creature he knew, suggested that something massive had once moved through this corridor. Horizontal stalagmites jutted from the cliff faces at every angle, hooks pointing at the ceiling, completely ignoring gravitational expectation. He had not seen them clearly on the balloon survey. He saw them clearly now. The hair on the back of his neck rose and stayed there.
No seagulls. No seaweed at the tide line. No clam shells. No evidence of anything choosing to be here.
They located Lotus’s marked crack in the cliff face — a fracture, really, an almost vertical split in the rock face running straight down into darkness, with a path of one and a half meters cut through it. As Roland descended the stairs and passed through the gap, Nightingale stopped.
“What is it?” he asked.
She was looking at the darkness below the path. “There are holes down there. Round ones. In the rock.” She hesitated. “I’ve seen similar ones in the Impassable Mountain Range. Larger, but the same shape.” Her voice was careful. “Something is watching from down there. The further I try to sense into the depth, the stronger the feeling gets — and there’s more than one.”
Roland looked. Inky dark, fathomless, and at the floor of it, yes — the suggestion of circular apertures. Regular spacing. Not natural.
“After Sylvie returns,” he said, “I want her and you at the Impassable Mountain Range to look at those holes properly.” He looked at the darkness for one more moment and made himself move on. “Keep going.”
This continent had been settled by humans for a thousand years, and still — standing in Devil’s Town with the Blackstone towers ranked in their private geometry around him — Roland felt the old frustration: they knew nothing. They had never looked. Agatha had told him the Union’s surveyors had sketched the Fertile Plains in detail and produced a rough outline of Land of Dawn, but beyond that shoreline, their maps went blank. Roland had once thought he would have cartographers working every coast within a generation. Now he stood inside a demonic camp on his own territory and realized he was ignorant of what lay within the kingdom he already ruled.
The war against the church would not wait for that problem to be solved. He filed it and moved on.
Agatha and Soraya met the group at the First Army’s camp.
“Where are Lightning and the others?”
Agatha sighed. “Flying.” She gestured at the towers with a resignation that had aged approximately one week. “She has turned this entire camp into her personal exploration ground.”
Roland activated the Sigil of Listening. “Lightning. Come in.”
“Lightning landing!” — the voice was almost immediate.
She came down in a broad arc, arms out, blond hair streaming, wearing the expression of someone who has been having an exceptionally good several days. She hit the ground running and crossed the distance to Roland before he had time to step aside, and embraced him with the full-body confidence of someone who has been outside the normal social rules for so long she has stopped noticing they apply.
Roland endured this with moderate grace.
Then Maggie arrived. She touched down with a boom that nearly threw Summer from her back, transformed back to human, and flung herself forward in the same fashion.
Lightning was fourteen. Maggie was an adult witch. Roland was working on a theory that Lightning’s behavior patterns were contagious, and that prolonged aerial cohabitation had transferred the condition.
“Since everyone’s here,” Roland said, looking at Summer. “Are you ready?”
Summer was still visibly shaking in her knees. “Yes, Your Majesty.”
She walked to the edge of the great cavern and closed her eyes.
The air changed. The hole in the ground was replaced by a massive black stone tower rising through suddenly thick Red Mist, almost blood-dense in the reconstruction, and the camp materialized around them to its former state — towers standing, mist flowing — exactly as it had been twenty-six days ago.
Roland stepped back involuntarily. He was holding his breath.
“This is the moment before the incident,” Agatha said. Her voice was controlled but barely. “Summer holds the reconstruction for nearly an hour on a single trace-back at this distance in time. That’s long enough to see everything that happened.”
Tilly was already scanning the tower above them, shielding her eyes against the reconstructed light. “Where was the Eye Demon? The one that would alert the camp if it saw us?”
“At the top of this tower.” Agatha pointed upward. “Summer’s reconstruction radius is roughly five meters. The top of the tower is beyond it.”
The stone beneath them shook.
“Here it comes,” Agatha said, quiet and intent.
The ground buckled and split. The black stone tower lurched into the air. A Megamouth Beast erupted from the crack below it — grey-skinned and enormous, its jaws wide enough to take the tower whole, viscous fluid spraying from the movement of its body.
No sound. Summer could reconstruct the scene, not the noise. Roland watched the Megamouth Beast try to swallow the tower, and he watched the tower’s base move — writhing, not settling, because it had been a Tentacle Monster all along, its sleek black body fused so completely against the stone that only the small constellations of red-glowing scale had distinguished it from the structure it inhabited. The Tentacle Monster’s appendages lashed upward to brace against the Megamouth Beast’s open palate, preventing the jaw from closing, while from the scales a black-dark mist began to discharge — corrosive, clearly — rolling against the Megamouth Beast’s skin.
It was not enough. The Megamouth Beast was too large. The tower lifted, the Tentacle Monster was crushed against it, compressed between the closing jaws, and then the tower followed it down. The Eye Demon at the apex of the tower never moved — sat there through the whole event, unresponsive, making no attempt to flee.
The reconstruction ended.
Red Mist and monsters dissolved. The great empty hole in the ground remained.
Roland’s heart rate was considerably higher than it had been five minutes ago, and the reconstruction had been silent. He found himself thinking about what it would have been like with the sound restored, and decided he was glad Summer didn’t have that capability.
A long silence.
“The wriggling monster,” Tilly said carefully, “that attacked Miss Agatha’s lab — was that what we just saw?”
“The Megamouth Beast, yes.” Roland looked at Agatha. “Not a demonic hybrid under the demons’ control — you don’t think so, do you?”
“No.” Agatha had clearly been working through this for the past several days. “The Union’s records from two Battles of Divine Will don’t include anything like it. If the demons could command Megamouth Beasts, they could have used them against Taquila directly — had them carry senior demons underground past the city walls. Taquila would have fallen in the first year.”
Tilly’s brow furrowed. “Then who commands them?”
“Nobody,” Nightingale said, spreading her hands. “Hybrids aren’t ordinary demonic beasts. They think. The Months of Demons proved that much. Maybe they just — want things. Maybe those things brought them here.”
Everyone laughed. The tension broke. Nobody seriously believed that creatures whose primary behaviors involved wrestling in subterranean mud had developed political objectives.
Roland did not laugh.
He was looking at the hole.
Mankind the most intelligent species? He had no way to presume that, not on this continent, not in this world, not where the requirements for intelligence might have evolved along entirely different gradients. Demonic beasts would not care about bread or silk. They would care about whatever their environment had made them care about. Intelligence built for those parameters would look unrecognizable to him, and might still be genuine.
“Why didn’t the Eye Demon react?” Andrea asked. “It was just sitting there. You said the whole camp wakes up the moment it sees you.”
“Because nothing saw it,” Agatha said. “Eye Demons enter a reactive state when they are observed — when a perceiving entity looks at them. The Megamouth Beast has no eyes. It has no light-sensitive organs at all.”
“Because it doesn’t need them.” Roland stood and moved to the edge of the cavern. “It lives underground all year. Eyes are expensive to grow and maintain. An organism with no use for light doesn’t develop light-sensitive structures.” He crouched. The hole went down further than the torchlight reached. “Lightning.”
She was beside him instantly.
“You want me to go down.”
“I want you to fly to the far end of the tunnel and tell me what direction it runs. Don’t go further. Come back the moment you have a bearing.” He looked at her directly. “He ate demons. Not Agatha.”
Lightning pouted. “I’m not allowed to investigate anything.”
“Not this. Out and back.”
She accepted this with the resigned dignity of someone who has learned that most of Roland’s restrictions eventually have reasons. She lit the portable torch from her pack, lowered herself into the hole, and descended.
A few minutes later her voice came through the Sigil: “I’m at the other end! Can you see the torch?”
Nightingale turned a slow circle, reading the light. She stopped facing southeast.
Roland stood. The snowcapped mountains loomed behind Nightingale’s right shoulder, their peaks lost in cloud, their slopes sheeted in permanent ice that caught the afternoon sun.
Southeast.
Someone else had reached the same conclusion. Tilly was already looking.
“We were wrong earlier,” she said. “The wriggling demonic beast in the Misty Forest — it wasn’t going to Devil’s Town. Or not only to Devil’s Town.” She looked at the mountain. “It was heading for the snowcap.”
“It seems so.” Roland looked up at the summit, where ice and cloud merged into the kind of whiteness that hid everything. “Which means we need to understand what’s inside that mountain.”