Gcial Ambush

  "Fuck!" shouted Marci, cutting off Jonda and making the elf blink owlishly at her.

  There were soldiers heading towards the Dreadfort. Human soldiers, mostly, there to kill her, to shatter her Shard. Through Likes Hammers' eyes she could see them creeping forward across the cirque, dozens and dozens of them.

  If they got into the fortress, then, even if there were traps and defences, there was no way she would be able to hold off that many people, even if she was willing to actually go all out. Which she wasn't. They weren't actually, at present, doing anything wrong. They were, quite understandably, coming to destroy a terrible and evil weapon that was already warping and corrupting the nd around it.

  Except that doing so would kill Marci. Something she was very much opposed to.

  "Mistress?" asked Jonda.

  "You- you lot!" said Marci, pointing at the demon group who had just applied to serve her, Rafferty the pit fiend, Maeve the imp, Finnley the four-armed, blue wrath demon, and Saoirse the conservatively dressed succubus, who were just sitting down at a nearby table. "You're all hired!"

  "Excellent!" said the pit fiend, before pausing. "Well, we'll be wanting twenty percent above the standard rate-"

  "Yes, yes, fine!" said Marci, fpping her wings and taking off into the air.

  As soon as she agreed to their terms, even verbally, Marci felt bonds form with the group of demons. They were weaker than the ones binding Jonda and the kobolds, more… contingent, but still definite and strong.

  "Come with me, now!" said Marci, grabbing the various papers and resumes and fpping back into the air. "Quickly!"

  "Now? But-"

  "NOW!" screamed Marci, a strange, terrible, eldritch cadence yering itself over her voice and making it rumble and reverberate through the inn.

  Marci blinked at the demons, who blinked back at her, before they scrambled to gather up their things, down their drinks, and then rush after her. In her mind she could feel the kobolds running around madly, rushing to arm traps and prepare the fortresses' defences — such as they were.

  "Jonda, how do Shardforts fly?" said Marci, turning to look back at the red-faced, panting woman who was struggling to keep up with a fairy in flight.

  "That- don't you know, Mistress?" said Jonda, gasping for breath.

  Marci swore again, and contacted Likes Hammers.

  "How does the Dreadfort fly?" she asked, speaking directly into his mind as he continued to watch the approaching humans.

  "Flies? No, no, flight system not fixed. Is broken," said Likes Hammers, shaking his head and making his perspective swing wildly.

  "Then fix it!" shouted Marci, both out loud, and in his mind. Then she broadened her command to all of the kobolds. "Fix the flight system! Everyone! Everyone fix it! Fix it, fix it, fixitfixitfix!"

  "Yes, Lady Keeps!"

  Part of Marci felt bad that she had yelled at the poor kobolds. They didn't deserve this. She really was going to have to find a way to help them. Maybe she could get them to unionise…?

  She pushed away the thought. Survive first, try not to be a horrible monster second.

  Marci, accompanied by her new, rather small four-demon army plus Jonda streamed back into the portal nexus, and all but hurled herself through the portal. Likes Hammers had delegated another Kobold to watch the advancing human forces, who Marci estimated were less than ten minutes away, a small, nervous woman called 'Makes Careful Cuts.'

  "OK, listen up," said Marci as the st of the demon party emerged from the portal and looked around at the room. "There is an army of humans approaching the Shardfort."

  "This seems a bit… dingy?" said Maeve the imp, running a red finger across a dust-strewn surface. "Wait, an army?"

  "Are they on gryphons?" asked Rafferty, the hulking pit fiend. "Should we man the cannons?"

  "No, they're on foot, because however this stupid fortress flies, it isn't working," said Marci. "And I don't think we have any cannons. Or… if we do, they're covered in ice!"

  The demons looked at each other, and she could sense from surprise and disquiet.

  'Just who did we sign up with?' she caught from the surface thoughts of Saoirse before Marci forced herself to stop peering into their minds.

  "I need you to guard the entranceway," she said the others. "We need to buy time for the Kobolds to fix the flight systems."

  She looked to one side and focused on Likes Hammers, who was now down in one of the 'lower' areas of the fortress where there was some kind of massive, complex looking machine full of cogs, levers, drive shafts, glowing runes, eerie crystals, and a whole host of other weird and strange devices.

  'How long to fix it all?' asked Marci, trying not to let her panicked emotions leak through.

  "With all Kobolds? Maybe an hours?" said Likes Hammers. Part of Marci wondered how Likes Hammers knew how to fix a flying-engine-thing, but she resolved to ask that some other time when she wasn't in imminent danger of being killed.

  "Fuck!" Marci shouted again.

  An hour. An hour until they could fly away. And there were… how many soldiers? That looked like a good fifty or sixty already in view. They were making slow going of it, but they'd reach the fortress soon enough, and even if the demons she'd hired were terrifying, particurly the hulking pit fiend, that wasn't going to stop an army that big.

  No. She needed to slow them down.

  Fog. Fog could help. They'd struggle to find the entrance, let alone stay coordinated if visibility plummeted to a few meters…

  She zipped off down the corridor, ahead of the demons who were following Jonda to the entranceway. She passed several kobolds who were scurrying down towards where the flight engine, several portcullises that looked ready to be dropped, and then out into the sun-lit foyer.

  The sunlight seemed uncomfortably bright as she emerged into day and saw the advancing soldiers with her own two eyes. And she had to hold up a hand to ward off the gre. Was that some new side effect of becoming a Shardkeeper? That she found sunlight unpleasant? She hoped not.

  Power surged around her she rose higher into the air, and glyphs snapped into existence as she prepared to cast the rank four spell. Some small part of her noticed that, although she still had to construct and understand and adjust everything, it seemed that the mana that was pouring through her soul which now y within the Shard was somehow calmer? Stiller? Instead of a raging river of chaos, it was more like a calm, gently roiling ocean. It still eroded the circuits, but constructing the spellwork was much, much easier than it had been back in Saxmoor.

  Was this what the books had meant about Shardkeepers being exceptionally powerful wizards? That it wasn't just that they had more to draw on, but that, somehow, the Shard reguted things? Put up guard rails that let them be a bit more reckless than any wizard who didn't want to be reduced to a fine ash would dare?

  There were some faint shouts from below as the advancing army spotted the glinting of magic, and Marci saw and felt a few wizards amongst their ranks summoning their own spells. But it was too te, they were too te, and with a triumphant 'hah!' Marci released her enchantment.

  Fog erupted in all directions, washing over the gcial cirque and cutting visibility down to virtually nothing. The air was still calm and still, so she heard the cries of arm and fear from the humans, but she knew exactly where she was in retion to the demons and Jonda, who had just arrived at the entranceway. No, she wasn't hampered by the spell, and they wouldn't be able to find the fortress, especially if she froze the only entrance, which upon reflection might have been actually one of four spaced around the fortress on sunken battlements.

  Then Marci felt a massive surge of magic from the advancing army, and she whirred around to see the Fog burning away from the power of a potent, and remarkably quickly cast dispel. The obscuring mist parted, revealing the army and, in particur, a tall, robed elf, looking to be somewhere in his early four hundreds, dressed in blue robes and holding a staff aloft as magic poured off him. He looked straight at her with familiar forest green eyes that she hadn't seen since her days at college.

  "Oh no," whispered Marci.

  Her old supervisor: Professor van Valkenberg.

  What the hells was he doing in Goltburg!?