Tallah

Vergil skidded to a halt, halfway up the first set of stairs leading up. Grefe shook beneath his feet with the roar of stone grinding itself to dust. More explosion followed. A glance back showed Tallah falling, the platform crumbling under her feet.

Would she be alright?

Instinct kicked him back, certainty burning that she didn’t have enough time to get clear. A mad, stumbling rush back down the stairs while the tunnel shivered and shook as if in a fit. More stones tumbled. He hadn’t gone far to begin with, but now the distance back stretched to unreachable lengths. Every stride felt too small, too slow.

Tallah fell. The rock beneath her feet shattered, pitching her into the black. She tumbled back, thrown off her feet, falling without a flail.

Vergil stopped by the lip of where the platform had been. A glance up had him pulling back, arms over head, to hide behind the wall as more fireballs slammed into the facade.

“Tallah!” He chanced another glance out through the choking dust. She would’ve been in the dead centre of the explosions. Taking her out couldn’t have been that easy!

It couldn’t—

Tallah shot out through the smoke and dust, curling it all around her figure. Her hands were ablaze and she loosed twin flame bolts at some position far above. Explosions lit up the high galleries heartbeats later.

He would’ve whooped for joy. Her ascent crested into an arc and she spun in the air, reaching out for the wing of a surviving statue. It snapped off under her falling weight and she tumbled down, out of control.

Vergil saw the glint of more fire screaming down on them. Instinct told him to run, that Tallah would be fine. She’d always been fine before.

Move, lad! Catch ‘er.

Moving without thinking, he reached out from the lip of the ruin, arm outstretched, hand reaching for Tallah’s falling form. It was a moment’s inspiration, his fingers grasping her coat, gripping tight. Her weight pulled him forward but an arm around a pillar steadied them both, desperate strength keeping him from falling out into the gap. Feet slipped forward to the very edge.

Muscles bunching, pain exploding in his back, breath knocked out by the effort, he still managed to hold her.

“Arm. Quick!” he groaned as fire descended upon them.

Had she fainted?

With a groan, Tallah stirred and twisted in place. She reached back and grasped his wrist, feet bracing against the jagged stone wall to scramble up.

“Pull,” she demanded.

He did. Explosions pock marked their surroundings, balls of fire smashing down with near-desperate cadence.

Tallah grabbed his belt and hauled herself up the moment she could get a hand over the lip of the crater. She pushed him back, spun and loosed her own volcanic answer to the assault, a series of balls of flames careening out into the night.

“Get to him.” She’d been hurt. Part of her face was blistered and scraped raw, her hair in a loose mess. “Get to the old bastard and bury an axe in his throat.”

He didn’t need telling twice.

“Just keep him busy.” He was already moving again.

Tallah leaned on the wall, drew a deep breath as three more explosions rocked the narrow gallery in which they’d huddled. Walls cracked and split and part of the room crumbled out. She shifted aside and ignited..

“He’d better pray you get to him before I gather my wits about me,” she groaned, voice cold. “Move, boy. I’ll have him busy.”

Fireflies detonated the following fireballs, their bursts of light sending dancing shadows through the stairwell as Vergil ran. He shielded his face from the blasts of dust cascading down.

Wizards and witches, drays and corallins, the stupid and the stupider.

Keep yer eyes shut and ye just may keep’em a while longer.

The dwarf kept advising in the manner Vergil had begun getting used to. For all he could tell, the Hammer was only interested in fighting and diving into the thick of things, even without the helmet giving him control. He seemed more than happy to simply advise as long there was fighting to be done. Without his advice, Vergil wasn’t certain he would’ve survived the fight with Erisa from earlier, and it had cost him nothing thus far.

It did not change the tightness in his chest.

If he’d been a bit stronger… a bit faster… better, then Sil wouldn’t be in terrible danger now. He dreaded what Erisa was going to do and hated the old man for delaying them. Now Tallah had entrusted him with a mission as she exchanged fire with the bastard.

Vergil flew up the stairs, axe in hand, chest heaving with the effort. He would need to become stronger, be better. Sil had relied on him and been taken.

A flash of hollow eyes had him stumbling up a final incline, heart threatening to burst in his chest.

None o’ that shite.

The vision blurred and Vergil felt as if someone pushed him right back up to his feet. How was the dwarf doing that? It didn’t matter. A quick glance outside the room, through a thick curtain of webs, showed fire erupting out the window of a dwelling on the other side of the ravine. A narrow, open bridge connected his side to that, and he’d be fully in view while crossing.

Cursing his luck, he crept forward, crouched low to not alert the old man. He would only get one chance to surprise Ludwig and he meant to take it.

Tallah’s fire missed the window by spans. She’d lost her glasses and Vergil wondered if she was missing on purpose, or simply couldn’t pinpoint Ludwig’s presence. Part of him dreaded the bridge and how she might blow him up by mistake.

No. She was missing on purpose! All her blasts hit away from the pillars supporting the building, just so far that it wouldn’t send Ludwig toppling to his death but obscure the bridge by smoke and dust.

“Yes, yes, I’ll try and catch him myself,” he groaned as if she could hear him. Tallah wanted her mask back. It wouldn’t do to send it into the abyss along with her old teacher.

A deep breath. A short sprint forward among the pillars and the bridge stared at him. Narrow enough that only a person would be getting across at one time, smooth and without any kind of side protection, it was a nightmare in waiting.

If Ludwig got even a whiff of his crossing, Vergil would be dead in the next heartbeat. Nowhere to hide. Nowhere to retreat.

A sprint would get him across in maybe ten seconds? He eyed the far side and tried to picture where he’d need to go. A fireball exploding in the dwelling atop his target sent a thick swath of dust cascading down into the gallery and his considering was done.

He ran, feet pumping as fast as they could carry him across the narrow gap, mind desperately trying not to consider the drop beneath. Flames burst from the rooms ahead and he knew from painful experience how fast the webs would burn out. Drew a deep breath, held it, and leapt through the curtain of flames to roll on the other side.

Thick smoke filled the room, the heat intense. Smoke stung his eyes as he oriented himself, took the left hand path to climb a wide set of stairs, and rushed ahead. Ludwig may not have seen him crossing, but that wasn’t a chance worth taking.

Down!

Vergil threw himself to the floor, among the ashes of the burnt webs, and a lance of fire punched through the smoke above. He rolled and another gout of directed flames washed across the place he’d been at.

“It doesn’t need to end here, lad.” Ludwig’s voice spoke from the smoke-choked darkness. “You don’t need to follow that monster around. You don’t even understand what she is.”

He recognised the thick whoosh of fireballs launched. Was the old man strong enough to actually fight Tallah now that he’d lost the initiative? Sil’s words from earlier came back as he trudged through the smoke, breath held, eyes stinging. Ludwig may have been old, but that did not make him any less dangerous.

Fear th’old soldier, dry shite.

The older the wizard, the thicker the stench o’ blood on’im.

Ears sharp. Keep low.

He did. The smoke thinned and he could just make out the swish of feet in the settling dust, together with the odd sounds of fireballs tearing away. Two rooms over, maybe. Left hand. Vergil huddled near the entrance, willing his heart to calm.

Tallah’s attacks had slowed, or their blasts were far off. A couple more whooshes were interrupted with a cry from the old man. It tore through the air as if he’d been stabbed and, for a brief moment, Vergil considered moving beyond the entrance.

Foreign instinct needled him to wait. Instead, he drew back and slipped into a side room, as low to the floor as he could get without crawling. Moments later a fireball flashed into the room he’d been occupying and exploded with a thick boom that rattled his teeth. The dwelling shook but the wall shielded him from the blast. Smoke billowed in and he used the moment to breach farther, trusting to what he’d seen of Grefe before that the room would, inevitably, circle back to where he needed to get.

He stuck his head out a side window and drew in a lungful of clean air. It was getting hard to breathe and near impossible to keep his eyes open in the mire.

Again, Ludwig screamed as if fighting someone off. Maybe it was a spider?

“The Kin are not here.”

Luna’s voice startled him out of his skin. He stuck a fist in his mouth to batter down his surprise.

The spider clung to his back, such a familiar presence now that, in the rush of things, he’d forgotten about it. Luna’s voice was tiny, whisper-thin, as if it spoke only to him.

“We help friend?”

It perched on his shoulder and pressed against his cheek, waiting for whatever instruction he had to give it. A pang of guilt stabbed through him as he remembered the burning flowers and the trampled, churned out ruins of the beds in which they’d sat. Luna had asked them to be careful, to show restraint, and they’d only left ruin behind.

That it was still calling him friend…

“I need you to distract him,” he whispered, guts twisting at the idea of sending the spider into Ludwig’s range of fire. But the longer he kept them pinned down and occupied, the more time Erisa had to do whatever she had planned for Sil. Morals were a luxury that time did not afford him.

For Sil’s sake, he’d live with a guilty conscience.

“We will. We give Knowing.”

“Don’t. Just try and not get hurt. I only need to get close.”

To do what exactly, he didn’t yet know. Just killing the old man sat wrong in his gut, but leaving him to Tallah’s care wasn’t any more palatable. He’d subdue the man, somehow, and get the mask off him first and foremost. Everything else could come later.

Luna dropped to the floor and became one with it, hidden from view in an instant. Only the dust being disturbed showed the spider’s passage. Vergil crept forward, going room to room, keenly aware of Ludwig’s struggling noises. It sounded as if he were fighting something right there in the room. Luna couldn’t have gotten that close yet, not if he was any judge of distance.

Means t’ bai—

“He’s baiting Tallah,” Vergil whispered to himself, cutting the mad dwarf off. “I know he’s trying to bait her. I’m not stupid. Is he?”

Tallah wouldn’t fall to something as blatantly obvious as that. Of that, at least, he was certain… nearly.

She was tired and coming off fighting several of Grefe’s scariest spiders. She’d been caught by surprise by Ludwig and almost fell to her death if Vergil hadn’t been there. Maybe—

Ludwig screamed louder now, and Vergil heard Luna’s whispered message in his head, “Now, friend. We attack.”

He rushed out of hiding, crossing the two rooms separating him from Ludwig’s position, heedless of the racket he kicked up. Three quick strides brought him across the first smoke-laden room, three more got him halfway into the second.

And he ran face-first into a floating fire orb. A heartbeat’s warning showed the blob of light in the eye-stinging mist of web ash and dust, and a second was nearly enough to get his arm up to protect his face.

It exploded with the concussive boom of a bomb. The shock wave blasted him off his feet while the heat wash seared his exposed face. He’d nearly managed to turn around. Nearly.

The blast threw him across the room to smash into a wall and crash down among the detritus of a thousand years. The world sang in his ears in the tone of a ringing alarm, blaring with the intensity of a fire klaxon on the Gloria.

He’d dropped his axe and his hand gripped blindly for nothing. Formed a fist. It would do.

His right eye couldn’t close and clouded his vision. Even so, he found himself upright, both fists clenched, chest heaving. He shivered. Red messages crowded in his field of view, painfully sharp against the backdrop of near blindness.

Luna blanketed every thought with a mental scream. Pain mixed in with fear. A cry for help.

Vergil moved again without thinking, stumbling once, righting, pushing ahead with alien strength holding him upright. Every breath hurt. Every breath urged him on, like an engine sputtering to life again. He bled from places he didn’t know could bleed as they did.

Bleeding didn’t matter.

Sil mattered. Luna mattered. Tallah mattered.

They relied on him!

The spider burned when he rushed into the room, set ablaze by some magical mean as it screamed within an orb of flames. Ludwig, half-seen but nonetheless there, turned in shock to regard him.

Vergil’s fist caught him in the mouth. Ancient, abused teeth cracked and blasted into the back of the old bastard’s throat. He sputtered, retreated, brought his staff to bear in an awkward swing as if to swat away a ghost.

The strike caught him in the ribs and knocked out what little air he’d gulped down. It barely hurt. Vergil wrapped an arm around the shaft and dragged the old man close.

Ludwig tried speaking. Reasoning maybe?

But Vergil’s ears rang and he could hear nothing but the thunder of his heart. A distant part of him wondered why he wasn’t dead. The rest saw red, lashed out with a kick and scythed the bastard’s legs from under him.

Luna’s inferno extinguished, leaving the spider curled into a ball on the floor, still twitching. White-hot rage washed over Vergil as he advanced.

Channellers don’t fare particularly well in close-quarter combat, Tallah’s voice advised out of one of their distant session. Don’t assume we’re helpless if you take away our range. Know that I will burn myself to kill you if you get too close.

Ludwig tried that. Took a half-step back, ignited a fireball in his hand, swung it at him. Vergil punched out as Tallah had taught him, hand catching the old man’s forearm and twisting it upward. The fireball launched into the high ceiling, exploded and cascaded dust and masonry down on them.

He barrelled into his foe.

Fighting someone like me means you will get hurt. I’m not afraid to burn. Burns down to the bone are rites of passage for pyromancers. Tallah grinned in his mind’s eyes as his foot moved behind Ludwig’s, and his chest crashed against the old man’s. They fell together. If you can’t get the element of surprise, then get close enough to punch me and don’t be afraid of the pain. It’s inevitable for both of us. And you won’t afford being nice.

Ludwig raised his arm awkwardly, trying to twist away from his grasp. Vergil pinned down his staff arm, slammed the wrist against the floor until the grip loosed. Pulled back his free hand and punched the bastard in the face.

Again.

Erisa’s tortured form flashed in his mind, the mutated thing that was left of a little girl who’d been sacrificed to this fool’s ambition. He punched again and felt bone cracking against his knuckles.

Again!

Bloody froth bubbled up from Ludwig’s lips. He was screaming at him, writhing, trying to wriggle free, crawl away. The mask had slipped off his face and Vergil stared into bloodshot grey eyes.

He stared down into inhuman black eyes set on the face of a girl too young to have suffered as she did.

He stared into half-remembered empty pits brimming with hatred…

His arm pumped back and forth and Vergil could no longer feel the impact of knuckles striking bone, cartilage, or flesh. Well, now we know, a part of him whispered, its tone neutral. You can kill with your bare hands

Why care for this monster? Why allow the inhuman to live? Why—

Something grabbed his arm and wouldn’t let go even as he wanted to keep going, to strike and pummel until he’d be sure the old man could never hurt anyone ever again.

“That’s quite enough, boy,” Tallah’s voice said and the pressure on his wrist increased. “Get off him while he still draws breath.”

Reluctantly, he obeyed, not daring a look at what his hands had achieved. Blood slicked his gauntlets, so thick that it spread all the way up to his wrists. He stared at red fingers as if they didn’t quite belong to him. Everything hurt. His face throbbed. The eye still couldn’t close and itched. He didn’t dare touch it.

Tallah pressed two vials into his hands. “You did good, Vergil. Get yourself sorted out. See to the spider. It’s still kicking.”

When looking up from the blood on his hands and the ruin of Ludwig’s face, Tallah’s grey eyes met his. She smiled in a way he hadn’t seen before, a hint of pride to her face in as much as he could make out anything of it. “I hope I’m talking to Vergil, not the pissant in the helmet.”

“It’s me,” he confirmed. Pushing words out felt pretty much like trying to cough out glass shards. Coughing felt as if trying to rip out a lung piece by piece. “I’m fine.”

“Good. See to your friend.” She held her mask. It was dented awkwardly, the imprint of a fist etched into the silver. “You could’ve hit him after getting the mask.”

“Meant to. Things… happened.”

Her gaze swung from him to the ruin of Ludwig’s face, back again. “Things, yes. Good job, Vergil. You did good.”

It didn’t feel good. Part of him wanted to plant a boot on the bastard’s throat until eyes bulged out and whatever life lingered in the old husk was finally snuffed out.

That part scared him.