CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

"Customers," Jin sneered. Her eyes darted about the gloom of the warehouse, but she found no sign of the demon. Algol's voice almost felt as if it came from all around, no clue as to the direction of its source.

Movement flitted about the outer edge of Jin's firefly light. She doubted the shifting shadows belonged to the demon. By the simple fact of what they believed this warehouse to be, Jin felt confident assuming them to be fiends.

Holding her sword at the ready, Jin turned in place. She took stock of her surroundings, as did the others. The warehouse chamber was easily four stories tall. A grid of catwalks connected raise platforms halfway up towards the ceiling, and crates covered with canvas tarps stood in orderly stacks throughout the floor. Most noticeable was a dim, lurid green light coming from the southwest corner of the chamber. It came from a small workspace that Jin gave only a cursory glance in the moment. She caught the impression of steel workbenches, or possibly gurneys, and the light came from racks of many vials of an unknown fluid. The liquid itself was what gave off the fetid light.

Jin refrained from allowing the laboratory to claim her attention. There was a threat, and it needed to be taken care of before she could dig for answers.

"Algol," Jin growled. "You are invoked by the Law of the Highest King. Show yourself."

"Oh?" Algol's voice rasped from the shadows. "Well, that is most distressing. May I inquire of our customer as to what charges are invoked against a humble shopkeeper of Eastrun?"

She half-expected mocking laughter to answer her demand, but the feigned innocence wasn't surprising either. "What rot," Jin growled. "You are a demon. You wage war against Althandor and humanity. Show yourself!"

"Your accusations are false, Child of Algara," Algol said, his tone low but not yet menacing. "Our customers are beset by a misconception."

"That's something of his gimmick," Krayson muttered. "He likes to play at bestowing knowledge to counter ignorance."

Algol hummed in confirmation. "It is so. This is our most guiding of principles. Your misconception, Princess of Althandor, is that any of what transpires constitutes a war." The demon's voice dropped to a hateful octave. "This is absolution. Humanity is no more than the reagent needed to absolve our sin. We remove you so that we may be absolved our transgression against the firstborn. Forgiven and returned home to Paradise."

Krayson, Irsa, and Rex formed a group on Jin's right while Pacifica, Adar, and Gillwyn were on her left. They kept careful watch on the shadowed creatures on the light's periphery. Devara remained directly behind Jin, the best position for one royal assassin to lend support to another.

"Then pass and find Paradise in the Beyond," Krayson said. "Don't drag others into your misguided quest for atonement."

"Ah," Algol sighed, almost in relief. "A return customer. We trust the clothing he procured from us upon his last visit proved suitable. As did the mist goggles? Perhaps he would enjoy another match of our game."

"I'm here on official business this time, demon," Krayson said. "No more mind games."

"Surely, our customer must realize that games of the mind are by far the most enlightening, nor can he believe the misconception that the last of the firstborn can die. He knows this, for he saw the truths in the web we sought for ourselves. We are chained to this world by the Ethereum. Chained to the breach. We opened the way and were claimed by the opening. As the passage between worlds exists, as magic itself exists, so must we." His voice rose abruptly, swelling to fill the warehouse. One moment, calm, the next was utter madness. It was a lament of agony. "We cannot die. We cannot die! We cannot die!"

Behind Jin, the others shrank back from the pained shout. They grew unsteady. Only Jin stood firm.

"We shall see," Jin said. "Show yourself, and I will prove you wrong."

"She cannot!" Algol screamed. "She cannot kill what is dead at its core. The sin changes us. Changes us all. We became dead things, are dead things now, but soon to live again. So close to living again. All the firstborn shall live again and be returned to us! Stand down. Die!" His demand shifted and almost seemed a plea. "Be kind and die for us."

Krayson took in a trembling breath through his nose. "We won't. Your world's gone, Algol. Accept that it belongs to us now."

"NO!" Algol screamed. "It is ours, ours, ours, OURS!"

Provoked by the demon's howls, a fiend came leaping from the shadows. The skittering monster was struck from the air in mid-leap by a crossbow bolt. Rex readied another shot, but no more came bursting from the darkness. Not just yet.

"Our customer," Algol hissed. "He maligns us. Even as he serves, he maligns. We learned much of him in our last meeting, much of the place he holds upon the board. He is useful to us. Be useful again and please die."

"I will never be of use to demons!" Krayson shouted.

"But he already has," Algol whispered. "By his hand, the white emperor has reached the commanding vantage of the board, just where we wished her to be, just as we have shown our hidden card. The white emperor— or as the case may be, the empress— has been revealed. Your central piece is ours and has accepted the truth of her misconception. She was ours all along."

Jin grit her teeth as a stab of pain lanced through her chest. She felt Pacifica's eyes on her back, asking the question Jin didn't want to hear.

Do I believe that?

A voice not her own answered. Of her?

Of my sky woman. Of my Enfri.

Can you afford not to, daughter?

I don't want to. I try not to believe, I try to deny it, but no matter how hard I push it away, it always remains true. I can't stop. I love her still.

That is your weakness. Shed that weakness. My heir mustn't be weak.

Jin closed her eyes, and then a different voice spoke to her. It was not the voice she had accepted as belonging to her ancestor. This was new. And it burned.

You are allowed to have faith.

It was behind her.

Driven by pain and the sure knowledge of an unseen fiend's fangs at her nape, Jin's soul recoiled from the words. On her right, she barely noticed Krayson and Irsa whip their heads toward her in shock. A sharp intake of breath hissed through Jin's teeth, and her lips curled into an enraged snarl. Her eyes flashed open, and they now felt better able to pierce the shadows and reveal the hideous, twisted forms of the fiends surrounding Jin and her allies.

Also, a robed and hooded figure near to the alchemical workspace. Tall, hunched over, appearing sickly, and radiating an aura of malice.

The figure's head raised, and Algol lifted a four-fingered hand to point at her. "Remove them from the game."

Like a wave, the fiends surged towards Jin and her friends.

"Rise," she said, and she charged to meet them.

"To Her Highness!" Krayson shouted. He and the others followed Jin.

A fiend on two spindly legs appeared in Jin's path just as an arrow took it in the throat. Gillwyn's shot bowled the screeching thing over. A crossbow bolt took the next in Jin's path, and a shard of cryomantic ice impaled the third. Jin's friends cleared the fiends scrambling to bar her way to Algol.

There were too many fiends for Jin to break through. She found her footing and struck at the nearest creature. Her sword cleaved into mottled flesh, spraying foul blood across Jin's face. The stench of it was overpowering, like formaldehyde. Jin struck again, cutting the howling creature down before moving on to the next.

Blasts of icy air burst across Jin's back. She could sense the echoes of Pacifica and Adar joining in a unison link to conjure frigid gales against the fiends. Their spellcraft left several creatures flash-frozen in place like statues. Krayson and Irsa made themselves a wall between the fiends and Rex. The blood runner used barrier wards to block their advance, Irsa her own body. Guarded by the pair, Rex worked his crossbow with deft skill. Each release of his crossbow tossed a fiend away. His aim was nearly matched by Gillwyn's, yet she managed to loose her arrows faster. She peppered the larger fiends, slowing them to be killed more easily by Jin and Devara's blades.

Upon slicing through the body of her third fiend, Jin came to a realization. She'd fought fiends before; the didactic coterie had often been called to chase rumors of monstrous creatures haunting the frontiers of Althandor or neighboring kingdoms. The creatures here were a far cry from her previous experiences with fiends. They were much smaller in general though more lethal. It seemed likely they were engineered so. Jin had always encountered fiends that came about through unnatural yet still accidental means. These, with a purpose behind their creation, were different.

All fiends possessed a sizable measure of ferocity. Where before the fiends came to it through being driven to madness by the pain of their twisted biology, here the monsters were more focused in their bloodlust. Each was shaped in such a way to maximize its killing potential. Their claws were sharp as razors, teeth to rip and tear at flesh, acidic blood, and countless other offensive abilities. However, what Jin found most disturbing was the basic form the vast majority of Algol's fiends appeared to be derived from.

Bipedal, between four and seven feet and height, the fiends Algol had created within his factory were unmistakably created from human subjects.

Jin decapitated a fiend with a precise backswing. It was small, no more than four feet tall. Originally a goblin, perhaps. Just as likely it had once been a human child.

Anger boiled within her. These were her people Algol victimized. Her people the demon mutated into monsters and set against their own.

How dare he? she thought. How dare he?

She knew from Hana of Algol acquiring victims, but Jin couldn't accept so many passing through a slave trade in the Spired City. No matter how distracted her father was by foreign affairs, it was inconceivable for these numbers to go unnoticed. Algol clearly supplemented his victims from another source. They must have been slummers, the poor wretches living in poverty deep in the lowest levels of Eastrun. Few would have noticed such people vanishing here and there, and fewer would have cared if they did. Some might have even called it a blessing to have their numbers culled.

Jin knew her family had failed these people. She failed them, and now she was forced to kill them. Did they curse her as they died? Or perhaps, were they grateful to be released from such a hideous existence? Jin despaired of ever knowing the answer to that question just as she knew it wouldn't change what she had to do.

Snarls came from all around her. She needed to move her feet faster and faster to keep out of their reach, and her arms began to tire from repeated blows against their thick hides. Ten or more had already fallen to her blade, and more than triple that were killed by the others. Regardless, no end to the horde was in sight.

"Where are they all coming from?" Irsa shouted.

"Catwalks!" Rex answered, even as his crossbow picked off another of the creatures. It tumbled from the platforms overhead to splatter against the stone floor. "They're comin' in above us from different chambers."

Adar became a golden fangblade to better fight the creatures pressing in on his Diamond Knight. "This isn't a fiend factory," he called out. "It's storage! They were brought here from somewhere else!"

"Made elsewhere," Jin panted, more to herself than to be heard by the others. "Placed here for..." Her eyes widened. She slashed to drive back the fiends assailing her, then raised her voice over the noise of battle. "This is not the only one!"

Another fiend died beneath her sword, this one still wearing a tattered waistcoat. Jin's eyes peered past the dying wretch and sought out the demon responsible for this depravity. She found Algol where she last saw him. Algol watched the desperate battle with an air of boredom, as if none of this amounted to more than an inconsequential delay.

With a flick of his wrist, Algol murmured something too quiet for Jin to overhear. A small figure appeared from behind him, not a fiend but a young boy. This must've been the apprentice that Krayson spoke of. The boy scurried away from Algol towards one of the warehouse walls and took hold of a chain dangling from the high ceiling. Rindyn yanked down, and the chain rattled as it turned a system of pulleys.

"No," Jin whispered in horror. "Essence of all spirits, don't."

The warehouse doors raised open, and midday light flooded into the chamber. It was muted by the mists outside, but after the time spent in darkness it felt as bright as a cloudless day. Curling wisps of mist poured inside, as did the rumble of hundreds of Althandi voices going about the day's commerce.

The door opened onto a wide boulevard opposite the skybridge from Stormpeak to Arcrest Tower. Multitudes of pedestrians moved through the street, shopping at the merchant stalls or following carts up the lanes. Dozens of them, hundreds, and all unaware of the mortal danger they had just been exposed to. Passersby walked in and out of view on the other side of the open doorway, heedless of the battle waged just off the street.

A middle-aged goodman passing in front of the door turned his head to peer into the shadowed interior. He was allowed a single moment of dread before Hell unleashed itself upon the walkways of Eastrun.

Jin started moving as soon as the doors began to open, but she was far too late to stop it. As if driven by a single mind, the fiends stopped pressing in on her and the others, instead surging towards the door. Like a tide, they rushed out into the daylight.

There were screams. Shrieks of terror and of pain. Fiends tore into the nearest pedestrians. The walkways were painted red inside seven heartbeats. The creatures didn't slow to savor their first kills. They fanned out and sped up and down the boulevard, clawing and biting at anything or anyone unfortunate enough to come within reach.

Jin kicked at the Rindyn boy to knock him away from the chains, then she manifested a fire spell to shatter them. The warehouse door fell back down, but the press of fiends pushing their way through was too thick. The door fell on several, but the press of so many of them burst the door off its runners. Jin hacked at the crowd of them, conjured spellfire, did everything she could think of to slow them, but it was like trying to stop a hurricane by shouting at it.

Within seconds, the warehouse emptied. Jin frantically sought out the others and found them bloodied and breathless where she left them. Pacifica took healing through her bond to set right a ragged tear down her back, the fiend hunters wrapped bandages around bite wounds, and Krayson gasped for air on the verge of ethershock. Only Devara seemed capable of much more than recovering her second wind.

The fiends dispersed. Some continued on towards the skybridge and were greeted by the terrified shouts of the populace. Others split off and swarmed into side streets and alleyways, spreading the chaos to the levels just above and below. They left torn bodies of innocents in their passing. Only a handful of frightened people were left alive on the street just outside the warehouse. Some injured, others unscathed, and all of them fortunate to have avoided a fiend's full attention.

Jin's mind worked. She weighed and measured her options, hoping to find the course of action that would stop this from getting worse than it already had.

"Cousin!" Devara ran up to Jin, and she was as near to panic as a royal assassin could be. "The demon, he vanished!"

Jin looked back to the workstation with its glowing green vials. It wasn't only Algol who was gone, but the boy also. Jin would have heard a teleportation spell, so they either slipped out in the confusion or used one of the strange spells demons were capable of.

"The fiends, Devi," Jin said. "We have to stop the fiends!"

"As you say, but what? There's too many of them!"

Rise.

Jin grimaced and put a hand to her head. "I don't need you to tell me that," she muttered.

Devara blinked. "Jin?"

"No, not you." She took in a breath. "Evacuate the streets. Get people to safety. Pacifica, Lord Ascendent, fiend hunters, I need you to help her." She shouted at Krayson. "Give sending to the palace at once. Warn my father. Tell him to send the Home Legion and every available guardsman to Eastrun."

Krayson panted heavily, but nodded. "As you say, Highness, but how do I even begin to explain all this?"

Jin swiped her sword to the side to clear it of the greater portion of blood staining its length. "Tell him the battle for the Spired City just started."

Gillwyn spoke up anxiously. She appeared shaken but otherwise uninjured. "Highness? What do you want me to do?"

"Stay close," Jin said without turning. "I will need your nose. Algol must be eliminated, and I have no other way of tracking him." Jin breathed out and looked at her. "You have his scent now?"

"I... Y-yes, I do."

Jin nodded. She could tell that Gillwyn was facing things no village girl should ever need to face. Nonetheless, she did so without the benefit of a royal assassin's training. Gillwyn Forester of Moorhaven was a courageous young woman. Jin found much to admire in her.

"Come," Jin said. She faced the open warehouse door and looked out at the carnage. The death toll was already far past anything resembling acceptable. Motioning for Gillwyn to follow, she ran outside while manifesting a sending. "I seek Maya Algara."

Her ether stores were depleting, but Jin felt a sending was necessary despite being a significant drain on her stores. She didn't have to wait long before an answer came back to her.

"Jin, what in hellfire is going on? I hear alarm bells!"

"Fiends, Sister. Algol released them onto the walkways."

Maya swore. "We're on our way."

"There's more," Jin said quickly. "More warehouses. Algol wasn't making them here. He was storing them. The only reason to have separate facilities is if there is more than one place to keep them."

The sending went quiet for a moment. "You're telling me there are warehouses filled with fiends all over the city that could boil over any moment?"

"If they haven't already," Jin said. "Maya... we were too late. We were already past the point we could stop this when we left the palace. The demon was expecting us."

"That doppler filth! Kai must've sent word ahead." Maya swore again. "Where are you?"

"The Arcrest skybridge."

"We're on our way. Do what you can to get people out of the open."

"Already on it. Fly swift, Sister."

Jin slowed at an intersection. She could hear shouts and alarm bells from every direction, including up and down. Gillwyn caught up to her, her chest heaving from exertion.

"Any idea which way the demon went?" Jin asked.

Gillwyn tried to get her breathing under control. She looked from side to side while sniffing at the air. "I just smell fiends. Fiends and terror. You Highness... this is... this is worse than a skindancer in Moorhaven."

Jin bit her lip. "Anything else, anything at all. We have to find him."

Gillwyn closed her eyes and fought down her panic. "There's... It's that same wrong smell from before. Wrong-smelling blood."

"Take me to it."

Gillwyn indicated a stone stairway off the side of the boulevard that led up to the next level. "That way. I think it's coming from above us."

Jin ran towards the stairs. She could hear spellfire erupting somewhere behind her. The inhuman voices of fiends shrieked with pain. Jin knew the others were doing what they could to hunt down the fiends loose on the walkways. She was encouraged to see a shadow pass overhead and hear Adar roar while unleashing dragon fire. Once Zanda arrived in the area, two dragons working in tandem would be invaluable in exterminating the creatures.

The stairs ended several stories above on the next level, and Gillwyn led Jin towards another. She reported that the scent was coming from much higher.

Observing the chaos from high vantage, Jin thought. Issuing further commands to the fiends or simply appreciating the fruits of his labor.

It probably wasn't Algol. Demons didn't smell of blood magic as far as Jin was aware. She suspected a more familiar source for it. If she was right, she didn't know what she expected to do once she found it. Jin wished she had been skilled enough to put an end to Kai on the train, but things were going to be different this time.

She wasn't alone, and this time, she wouldn't be weak.

Her ether roiled in her chest. She could feel the oren already at work in her blood. It strengthened her and fortified her ether. Jin was confident she could now face Kai on something closer to even footing. He may have possessed Dashar's experience, but he wasn't Dashar. Jin could defeat a counterfeit.

She had to.

"Just ahead," Gillwyn wheezed. She was at the limits of her endurance. "It's... it's coming from..."

Jin stopped short and took hold of Gillwyn's shoulder. "Wait here. I will not let..."

Gillwyn sobbed. With a start, Jin realized Gillwyn had been crying since the warehouse.

"I'm sorry," Gillwyn whispered between gasps for air. She covered her face with her free hand. "I'm not..."

"You are not trained for this," Jin said. "You've not been prepared for this sort of thing from birth. There is no shame in that."

"I want to keep her safe," Gillwyn said. "That's all I want, to keep Cana safe. But I can't. I'm not strong enough. Not like you."

Jin felt breathless. "One person, no matter how strong they are, cannot fight the whole world. They can stay near them and show they are not alone. Often, that is the only thing we can do for the ones we love."

Gillwyn sniffled. "Speaking from experience?"

Jin looked off to the side and felt her shoulders sag. "What I could not do for the woman I loved. I chose the world over her."

"I'm sorry."

"So am I." Jin took in a breath. "We may speak more once this over."

Gillwyn forced a nervous laugh. "I'll wait my turn. Sounds like there's loads of girls wanting a piece of your time,"

Jin smiled wanly. She owed conversations to several people, but the one she wanted to see most was half a world away and despised her. If only there could have been a way, perhaps Jin could find closure and finally begin to recover from the wound in her heart.

Distractions. All nothing but distractions. There was an enemy close, and Jin needed to focus.

"Head back down to the skybridge," Jin said. "Find Devi or one of the others. Stay close to them, and we will make it through this."

Gillwyn nodded. "Winds guide you, Highness."

Jin waited for Gillwyn to head back down the way they'd come before continuing upward. She pushed all other considerations aside and prepared to fight for not only her life, but the lives of everyone in Eastrun. With her diminishing stores, Jin layered wards against spellcraft over her body. She would've liked to add additional self-enchantments, but she was neither strong enough or skilled enough with sorcery to improve on what she already had.

"We each have strengths, Jin," her father once told her. "Magic isn't yours."

It stung when Jin heard that for the first time. She'd been very young, barely old enough to hold a practice sword.

"But you have others," Father said. "You've found a few things you can do with spellcraft, haven't you? You can do wards well, and your uncles tell me you're 'wasting time' on learning how to wash your hair with spellcraft. That's alright. I'll talk with them and say you can keep at it. Just find the things you can do and stop worrying about what you can't. Take those skills and master them. Hone them, develop them until they're engraved in your bones, and I promise you, you'll show everyone something they've never seen before."

Jin's grip on her sword tightened.

Her father had been proven correct. Jin did as he asked and practiced. Even something as innocuous as personal care spellcraft taught her valuable lessons. She could rapidly clip the hairs from her skin with a thought, never in danger of harming herself. That useless spell taught her precision unmatched by anyone else in the royal assassins. Even Dashar.

"Don't be afraid of an arcanist who knows ten thousand spells. Fear the arcanist who knows a single spell ten thousand times over."

She ascended the stairs and came out onto a balcony overlooking the boulevard. It was not just Kai watching over the slaughter of innocents. Tarim was beside him, and so was his master.

The saint of Death turned away from the overlook to greet his niece.