Tenebroum

Chapter 195: Pretense of Power

The Voice of reason watched the moonrise with ambivalence, wondering for the hundredth time if she was the one that had struck down her master. Given that there was still no true sun, that seemed the most likely option at this point, given that none of her messages that had been sent to the Lich had been returned since that awful day when she had almost come undone.

Truthfully, every day since then had been hard, and no matter how much blood she bathed in, her body didn’t work quite like it was supposed to. The joints were stiff, and her movements were clumsy now. She was even thinking of getting a new skin. Much as the Voice loved the face of the princess who had betrayed her, it seemed somehow wrong to her now.

Everything seemed wrong now, though. All the tiny kingdoms, city-states, and caliphates that she’d spent so much effort turning toward her master were growing restless and mutinous, and there was little she could do to stop any of them if they decided to strike out against her and her master.

For now, they continued to send their tributes in gold and bodies. Once these would have been directed further south, to Blackwater and her master. Now, they never left the small palace that she had been gifted near the edge of Tanda.

She knew the place was a trap, and that existed so the Goddess of the city could spy on her, but there was nothing that the Voice could do about that just now. After all, she had nowhere else to go. There was nothing but death to the south, and though part of her wanted to reclaim Rahkin and build it up as a city created to honor the Lich in a dark sort of way, there was no one left in the south to populate it, and the dead needed some source to fuel the dark magics that powered them.

Even now, her black ships were still moored off the shore, just barely visible from the city, but they were mostly empty now. Someday soon, someone would test their aura of dread invincibility, and it would crack like an eggshell. Most of her best warriors had already been appropriated by the Dark Paragons, and she lacked the power to keep those who were left from doing much more than standing there.

Even that was only accomplished by her regular sacrifices and dark rituals that were conducted in her enshadowed palace. She knew very little of the necromantic arts that raised her and her minions, and it was all that she could do to simply keep those existing spells functioning. As much as she would like to create new minions with an eye for superior aesthetics, that was well beyond her. She had tried to clothe the bodies of some of her war zombies in the skins of her sacrifices, but that produced only a different sort of terrifying appearance, and she quickly abandoned the project.

Still, if the small Goddess Tanda Nihara was to be believed in days or weeks, this entire pretense would fall apart. Even according to the Voice of Reason’s own reports, the war in the north was not going well. She didn’t need any magic of her own to understand why.

One minute, the dark generals were executing plans with perfect precision using nearly unlimited armies, and the next, their forces were evaporating because they lacked the powers to maintain them. Her most recent report said that they had managed to create a ritual that turned the entire act of battle into a perverse form of blood magic, but even that had its own drawbacks.

Before, the Dark Paragons were patient tacticians who could test each defense and adapt to the changing strategies of the mortals they were pitted against. Now, in order to keep their armies from simply powering down to nothing, they had to constantly press the attack, which was far from optimal. Berserk levels of fighting would create losses far greater than the forges of Constantinal could replace, and she doubted very much that any reinforcements were being sent to anyone at this point. All of them were on their own now.

The Voice of Reason sighed and was about to go back inside her palace to decide whether or not she should stay or leave the city for the dozenth time this week when the city’s Goddess appeared before her. Well, appeared was the wrong word. She simply strode out of the stone wall. At first, Tanda Nihara was the barest series of rectilinear outlines, but moment by moment, she became a statue of a beautiful woman and then the woman that was depicted instead.

“Something new is coming this way,” she said abruptly. “What have you heard of it. Is this a new plot from the Lich?”n/ô/vel/b//jn dot c//om

Neither the Goddess’s appearance nor her abruptness surprised the Voice at this point. She was used to absolute power over the people that dwelled in her city. For a time, she had shown the Voice of Reason some small difference because Tanda Nihara had once feared the Voice’s master, but those days were gone.

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“Such a thing is possible,” the Voice of Reason agreed, though she had no knowledge of the subject. “Can you describe it to me?”

The city Goddess proceeded to describe a beast of unnatural size and power that was apparently rampaging through some of the kingdoms south of here. Truthfully, it did not seem much like the Lich’s work because it seemed more living than dead, but it was only when she spoke in detail about the mane of the thing that she remembered what the Lich had mentioned regarding the desert crypt it had ransacked years before.

“Malkazeen,” she whispered. “It finally found the thing.”

“That is a name that is both ancient and feared in these lands,” Tanda Nihara said, taken aback just enough for the Voice of Reason to notice. “What makes you say these things.”

A quick conversation revealed that though the people of the desert remembered the name enough to fear it, little was recalled beyond that at this point. To the people of Tanda, it was a beast of shadows that presaged war and famine, and even the Goddess remembered little more than that. Still, the Voice fetched quill and ink and drew as much as she could remember from the image that the Lich had shown her in its mind's eye. The result, even with her stiff and lifeless fingers, was an abomination that might make anyone afraid.

“The people will riot well before this thing arrives,” the Goddess of the city pronounced cooly after considering all this. “They will blame the darkness that infests our land on you, and they will be right to do so, I think.”

“What will you do to me then?” the Voice asked. She was not in a mood to surrender, but at the same time, she was well aware that she had no powers that could hurt the woman who stood before her. “Perhaps if I—”

“No,” Tanda Nihara said, shutting down the Voice before she even had a chance to speak. “Just because they are right to blame you and your master for this latest catastrophe does not mean I am willing to anger the Lich should he return.”

“So you are banishing me then?” the Voice of Reason asked, hiding her growing confusion.

“That is also impossible,” the stern-faced city Goddess answered. “You are too valuable of a pawn to let escape at this point. Depending on what the future holds for Tanda, I can tolerate neither your destruction nor your loss.”

“So I am to be a hostage,” the Voice said softly.

She considered a dozen different strategies she might try and a few convincing gambits but ultimately said none of them. There was no point. She lacked the power to back up even the softest implied threat, and her opponent almost certainly knew that.

Instead, after a moment's consideration, she finally answered, “Will you take me to the dungeon? I would like to pack a few things before—”

“You don’t need to go anywhere. This gift was always a prison cell whenever I desired to turn it into one,” the Goddess answered brusquely. “I trust that you will find it comfortable enough, but now I must go and warn others of the information you have provided so we can prepare for our defense as best we are able.”

Even as Tanda Nihara stepped into the wall, leaving behind only the fading afterimage of a woman in a temporary frieze that melted away before the Voice of Reason’s eyes, things began to shift unexpectedly. When Tanda’s Goddess had said this palace would be a prison, the Voice had assumed that she would simply have the king place imposing guards with shiny halberds at the exits.

While the Voice could still martial a few zombies, and her banshee wail was a formidable weapon to mortal ears, that would have been enough. That wasn’t what the city’s Goddess wanted, though. Instead, the whole building began to fold into a non-existent space.

One minute, her dark palace was the largest building on the small side street, and the next, it was shrinking into non-existence even as the smaller buildings on either side crowded in to take up the space.

The Voice of Reason felt a strain of fear shoot through her as she wondered what might happen to her. She said nothing, though. Instead, she stood stoically at the rail of her balcony and waited for the inevitable. The Lich had never revealed all the details of its dual with the City God of Constantinal, but it had said enough for her to know that this particular kind of small god was a true terror in their own domain, and any attempt to fight such power would end poorly for the Voice.

Oblivion did not come for her, though. Instead, as the building disappeared, it reappeared in the dunes of the desert outside the city somewhere.

No, not outside the city, the Voice corrected herself. Tanda Nihara would have no power outside her city. This is likely the place it was before the city was ever built.

The Voice didn’t know that for sure, but it seemed to be the most likely option. Looking up at the night sky a moment later made that more likely. The mood was gone, and after a moment of study, it was revealed that the familiar constellations were, too. Instead, they were replaced with the city lights in a sort of almost grid.

She was indeed trapped within a pocket dimension of the small Goddess’s making, which meant that escape was very likely impossible. The Voice of Reason sighed at that and went back inside to write all of this down before any of it slipped her mind. If the Lich had survived and made its presence known once more, it would certainly desire a full accounting of these strange events, and she would be ready.