And then, without warning, they had broken out into the central bowl of the demon’s domain, and were before the arch.
Nyrgoth had tried to describe it, but there were no words that might have prepared her for the sight. She felt her stomach knot with vertigo, staring through the arch at whatever lay beyond. It was bright, lurid. She had no names for any of the colours and they hurt her eyes. Parts of her mind threw up cascades of chaotic thoughts and images, just to look upon it. She thought she saw distant peaks and chasms, umbral and vast. A moment later they were no more than the wrinkles on skin held too close to the eye. The hideous distortion of it weighed down the world so that everything sloped inwards towards the arch. At the same time it seemed higher, lifted aloft, so that to approach would be to climb a barbed slope. There was no sound in the clearing, and despite that she could hear the world screaming at the wound opened into its substance. The air stank of rotting tin and soured gold.
She drew her sword, feeling only a great weight of hopelessness. Nyrgoth had told her this could not be ended with a blade and now she saw he was right. But a blade was all she had.
She took three steps towards the arch, fighting the world and herself for each one. “I will do this,” she swore. “I am Lynesse Fourth Daughter. I am my mother’s disappointment and my sisters’ mockery, and I have no purpose but this. I will save the world. Come out and fight me, demon!”
A squeal of abused metal startled her. The wizard’s monstrous servant, which had been lying unnoticed on its side, abruptly rocked and shuddered, remaining legs moving weakly. Nyrgoth was staring at it thoughtfully.
“Is that your plan? To send your monster in again?” she demanded, hearing her voice tremble.
“No, but . . .” Nyrgoth looked about them sharply. “Ah.”
“Ah?” Even as she echoed him, she understood. There was a slow rippling undulation passing through the surrounding growth, scales flexing and standing on end in sequence, a flurry of little tendrils chasing across the mottled surface. The pinhead beads of eyes moved and merged, becoming greater orbs: size of a fist, size of a head, until there were great dark wells staring out at them from all sides.
“It knows we’re here,” she understood.
“It has detected something, even if just the absence of itself in our shadow. I hear it interrogating me again. We have very limited time.” Nyrgoth took a deep breath. “I said you couldn’t do this with a blade.”
“You did, yes.”
“I was wrong.” There were odd muscles twitching about his face, and she realised with fascinated horror that she was seeing the real man, the bitterly unhappy victim of his own mind, trying to make himself known. What would that man say to her? Not to listen to the calm words his lips were telling her. “Lynesse Fourth Daughter, now is the time to do exactly as I say, and no more or less.” And he was fumbling with his clothing, to her incredulous horror. He was fiddling with the bindings and fastenings, that were all in the wrong place, until at last he had them free and had pulled back his robe and tunic and shift, shrugging them off his shoulders to reveal a lean chest and soft stomach. All around them the demon-marked mounds were shifting and swaying, and parts of them seemed to be bulging up as though the tangled mass was trying to give up the forms of animals and people. She saw a brief suggestion of limbs, of faces, and looked away hurriedly, meeting Nyrgoth’s eyes.
“You must do it,” he told her. “I can’t do it myself. Not even with the pain hidden away from me. I lack that kind of courage.” In three steps he was before the arch, watching the hungry feelers and barbed vines rise up from it like serpents, questing curiously through the air. Nyrgoth turned back to her, arms out. “Take your steel. Cut here.” The place he marked was beneath his ribs, close to where the demon’s servant had gutted him. She could just see the pale line of the wound, as though it had happened a generation ago. “Cut, and what you unleash shall undo the demon, if anything can. But be swift.”
“I don’t know if I can,” she whispered, but she had her blade out, tip scratching a bead of blood from his belly. There were stories, of course: one hero of the ancients had to unseam the Firebird that had carried them across the night, to release all the good things of the world that it had swallowed. Another had gone across the world cutting apart scattered seeds of the Tree of Changes to birth the first Coast-people. Stories, myths, contradictory parables. True without being real. But this was real.