Seven bodies lay in pieces across ground that was no longer ground.
The water stood ankle deep and took the light strangely, so the parts drifting in it showed as dark shapes rather than as anything with detail. Abel stepped over the nearest of them and lifted his wand into what passed for illumination inside the pocket.
He turned it slowly and checked the length of the shaft with his thumb.
The silver wire held. Under it the original fracture had closed to a line he could feel and no longer see, and the four cuts he had put through demon bone in the last ninety seconds had opened nothing new.
The heavy end of the register stayed off it. A repaired wand was still a repaired wand, and a curse that pulled against the wood's own disposition would find the splice and take it apart.
He walked to the edge of the pocket and set his palm flat against the wall.
It gave under the pressure the way deep water gives, then stopped giving at a depth of about two centimetres and held. Behind the surface the mass moved in slow rotation, one direction throughout, no eddies and no seams. He tracked it along four metres of curve and found the same rotation everywhere. He tried the tension at three heights and got the same reading at all three.
He took his hand back and shook the water off it.
Force was not going to open this. The wall was water functioning as a barrier rather than a barrier laid across water, and to break the function he would have to remove the medium. Evaporate it or freeze it, either would work in principle. The volume made both absurd. There was one thing in his repertoire that could consume this much water and it was Fiendfyre.
Fiendfyre would end the wand. Not crack it, end it. And the mutated form of it that this world had handed him was still a variable he could not solve. Without a wand to hold the leash, the hellfire he called up would go wherever it decided to go, and there was no version of that outcome where he walked away from it intact.
That left the demon.
Sitting still and waiting for the fight outside to resolve itself was the option that never entered the calculation. The wall was permeable in one direction at the owner's discretion, which meant Blackheart could arrive in this pocket in the next second, or four hundred devils could. He had no intention of spending the time leftwaiting inside somebody else's.
Water moved somewhere above and behind him, a thick rolling sound in a space that had held no sound at all.
Abel turned.
A face had come out of the curve. It was built from the wall rather than pressed through it, three metres across, brow and jaw and a mouth full of edges, all of it in the same slow rotation as the rest. The eyes were depressions where the water declined to reflect.
It looked down at the pieces floating around Abel's boots. Then it opened the mouth and roared, and every square metre of wall in the pocket answered with concentric rings.
Claws came out of the rings. Dozens of them, forming as they extended, each one the length of a man and closing from a different vector at once.
Abel came apart into black smoke.
Apparition would not carry him out of the pocket, and he had confirmed that inside the first minute. Inside it, the smoke form flew, and it flew faster than anything built from water could reach. He took a rising spiral through the middle of the space and let the claws close on the volume he had already left, and while he flew he watched the face.
The hypothesis had been sitting in his head since the wall first closed around him.
The Earth Demon had built its pocket out of stone it borrowed. This one had built its pocket out of water and its own substance together, and the wall had a heartbeat in it, that single unified rotation running through every part of the enclosure without variation. A construct made of borrowed material has no interior life. This wall had one. Which put the wall inside the definition of the demon's body rather than outside it.
He had spent months cataloguing which spells cared about that distinction, and a short list of them cared very much. Hit any part, and the whole receives the sentence.
Abel made the decision at the top of the spiral.
The Patronus went out of consideration first, and it went out on three grounds. His talent had always run dark, so the charm came to him at partial yield. Without corporeal form it needed contact to do work. And against a body distributed across ten thousand cubic metres of moving water, contact meant almost nothing.
Fiendfyre went out on the wand.
That left the middle of the register, and the middle of the register held something designed from the ground up to travel through a body and settle in the part of a creature that was not made of matter at all.
The smoke stopped climbing and consolidated, and Abel hung in the air three metres below the ceiling with the black still turning around his shoulders. He brought the wand up and laid it on the face.
"Crucio."
The three Unforgivables had never been the strongest curses he knew. That was the thing outsiders always assumed and always got wrong. In raw output they sat well inside the field, and the Cruciatus sat at the bottom of the three, a long way under Fiendfyre. What had earned them their name was the cruelty, and cruelty was measured on a different axis from power.
Today the bottom of the three was exactly the tool the job specified.
Scarlet light left the wand tip and struck the face between the eyes.
Nothing happened for a quarter of a second. Then the red stopped behaving like light and began behaving like a stone dropped into still water. It went out from the impact point in rings, and the rings crossed the face, and the wall behind it, and the ceiling, and the floor beneath the standing water, and they kept going. In the time it took Abel to draw one breath the curse had reached every surface of the pocket, and past the pocket, into every other wall the Water Demon was holding open across San Venganza.
Then the sentence arrived.
It came from underneath, in the place where the demon kept whatever it had instead of a soul, and it had nothing to do with the body. Pain of the flesh has a ceiling and a location. This had neither. It filled the whole of what the creature was, at a pressure that admitted no thought except itself, and it arrived all at once and in perpetuity, because a single instant of it was long enough to erase the concept of the instant ending.
"AAAAH—"
The scream came out of the water everywhere at the same time.
Every wall in San Venganza convulsed. Devils were mid-transit through them when it happened, and the transit cut off around them with the surfaces still moving, so they came out at both ends of the crossing in halves and the halves fell in different places and did not get up.
The convulsion ran to its limit and the structure gave. The walls stopped being walls, stopped being anything the demon was holding in shape, and reverted to the only thing they had ever really been. Water came down across the ruins in a mass, hit the ground, and ran outward through the streets in a sheet, and San Venganza reappeared underneath it, one plaza, one broken bell tower, all of it in one piece again.
Masters of Kamar-Taj came back into the same world as each other. So did the devils. Both sides came back mid-stance, weapons up, facing an enemy who had been somewhere else a second earlier.
Almost nobody looked at the enemy.
The water finished draining out of the plaza and left every combatant on the field with a clear line to the same place, and what stood in that place was a thing they would each carry separately for the rest of their lives.
Abel stood on the flat, boots in the shallows, wand levelled and steady.
At the far end of it the Water Demon had been forced down into a human shape, a man's outline in slowly rotating water, kneeling. The scarlet ran from the wand tip and lay on him and did not stop lying on him. The sound coming out of the shape had left the register of a voice some time ago. It was the noise a thing makes when the part of it that could be hurt has been located precisely and is being held.
The body could not move. Not toward Abel, not away. Every part of it was occupied.
What it could still do was beg, and it did, in a language most of the field did not have and all of the field understood, over and over, first for mercy and then, quickly, for something else. It asked Abel to kill it. It asked again. It kept asking, because dying was the only door out of the room it had been put in, and the man holding the wand had not yet chosen to open it.
Kamar-Taj had come to San Venganza to stop devils.
Standing in the drained plaza under a scarlet light, with a demon on its knees pleading to be allowed to die, more than one Master found the arrangement had come loose in their head, and could not immediately say which of the two figures in front of them the word was supposed to describe.
END CHAPTER 64