The begging went on.
It came out of the kneeling shape in a language nobody on the plaza had been taught and everybody on the plaza understood, and it had stopped being words some time ago. Masters of Kamar-Taj who had spent forty years learning to hold a line stood in the shallows with their mandalas still lit and found they could not keep their eyes on it. Demons who had come here to eat them backed up through the water in the same movement.
Abel lifted the wand a centimeter.
The scarlet went out. The shape of a man made of slowly turning water sagged forward onto its hands, and the sound it made changed into something closer to gratitude than to anything else.
Abel flicked the wand once across his body.
Nothing crossed the air between them. The head came off the shoulders anyway, went two metres, and struck the water. The kneeling body stayed upright for a moment on the strength of its own posture, then let go, and head and body together lost cohesion and ran out into the flooded plaza as ordinary silt-coloured water.
He lowered his arm. He looked exactly as he had ten minutes earlier, a young man in a wet coat holding a piece of wood.
Nobody standing in San Venganza was ever going to see him that way again.
The Ancient One crossed the drained flat toward him at an unhurried walk, as though the last ninety seconds had been weather.
"Master Abel. Thank you for taking down the water demon's sub-dimension." She stopped at his shoulder. "Leave the rest to me."
"It's yours," Abel said. "I'm in no condition to keep fighting anyway."
He came apart into black smoke, crossed forty metres of ruin, and re-formed sitting on a fallen block at the plaza's edge with his forearms on his knees.
He ran his left hand down the wand.
The silver wire was still tight. Under it, half a centimetre off the old fracture line, the wood had opened a second time. This time it was a shorter split, finer, running with the grain instead of across it. The Cruciatus had cost him that. Held at full pressure for as long as he had held it, against a body the size of a district, it had gone through the wand as surely as it had gone through the demon.
Small enough to work with. He could finish tonight on it.
He would not be finishing anything else on it. A new wand, built from scratch, as soon as San Venganza was behind them.
Out in the middle of the plaza, the other fight was still running.
The Ghost Rider had been in it alone since the pockets closed, and he had used the time.
Blackheart came at him again through standing water and the flames took him again before he arrived, and this time the Rider did not step back from the impact. He caught the clawed forearm coming in, turned inside it, and drove his fist through the devil's abdomen to the wrist.
The punch went through. What mattered was what he left behind in the hole.
He opened his hand inside the wound and let the hellfire out at close range, and when he tore his arm back the fire stayed. Blue-black flesh tried to close over it and could not. The burn sat in the wound like something bolted there, and the edges kept receding instead of meeting.
Blackheart put his head down and drove his shoulder into the Rider's chest, and the two of them went across the plaza together and through the base of a standing wall.
They came out of the far side of it in the same posture. The Rider had the chain doubled around one fist. He hit Blackheart across the face with it on the way through the rubble, hit him again with the return swing before the head had finished turning, and the second one landed with the full length of the links whipping in behind it.
The right side of the devil's face came off.
Skin, muscle and the surface of the cheekbone went into the water in burning pieces, and what was left was bone, bare from the jawline to the orbit, with hellfire crawling along the exposed edge of it. The regeneration reached the boundary of the burn and stopped there. It kept trying. It kept stopping.
Blackheart put a hand to his own face, felt the bone, and understood what had been done to him.
He had walked into this town certain that nothing standing in it could hold a wound on him. The thing in front of him had put two on his body in under a minute and neither was closing, and it was still coming forward, and it had not once slowed down or breathed or shown any sign that damage registered on it at all.
"You have no soul to burn," Blackheart said. "You have nothing to end me with."
The Rider did not bother answering that. He had learned it earlier in the evening and filed it, and he had spent every second since working the problem the other way round.
He came in with the chain trailing fire.
Blackheart met him with the filaments. Dozens of them, whipping in from behind the ruined head, and the Rider went through them, took hold of the devil by the throat and the ruined jaw, and put him down into the flooded ground hard enough to crack the bedrock under it.
Then he raised his fist over the abdominal wound to finish what he had opened.
Blackheart got a hand into the water beside him and found the edge of a fallen roof slab.
He swung it, coming up out of the shallows on its own weight with a demon's arm behind it, and it caught the Rider under the ribs and threw him off the body and across the plaza. He went the whole distance backward and came down on another slab, one of the collapsed ceiling stones the flood had stood on end, and he came down on it with the back of his neck.
The crack carried to the roofline.
His skull went over at an angle no skull is built to reach and stayed there. The hellfire wrapped around his frame dropped from a blaze to a flicker between one instant and the next, and black smoke began pouring off him in volume, streaming away across the water where the flame had been.
He did not go out. He lay on the broken stone with his head turned wrong and the last of the fire guttering along his collarbones, and he was still, and he did not fall to ash, and the chain in his hand kept burning.
Blackheart got up out of the crater slowly.
Half his face was bone. There was a hole through his midsection with fire still standing in it. Neither would close, and every second he spent upright, both of them cost him.
He turned toward the north side of the plaza and smiled with the half of his mouth that still had a face on it.
"The knight is dealt with," he said. "Now the Sorcerer Supreme. And when you are finished I will take the rest of your people apart one at a time, until there is nothing left anywhere that calls itself Kamar-Taj." He looked around the drained plaza at the devils re-forming their ranks. "Though by the time I reach you, my legion may have saved me the trouble."
"Thank you for the reminder," the Ancient One said. "I had very nearly forgotten to deal with your legion before I deal with you."
She raised one hand and drew it across the air in front of her.
The ground split at her feet. The fissures went out from her boots across the whole of San Venganza in a spreading web, running under water and stone alike without slowing, and one branch arrived beneath every living devil on the field except the one she was speaking to.
Purple electricity came up out of the cracks in thick ropes. It caught them around the limbs and the throat and the chest, hundreds of them at once, and it pulled.
They went down through the ground howling, and the ground closed, and the plaza was empty of them.
Abel sat on his block and felt the breath go out of him.
A hundred devils, near enough, erased inside two seconds by one gesture. There was a price on that spell. Of course there was one, she had stood after all and watched thirty of her people fight without using it, which said everything about what it cost her. Knowing the cost existed did nothing at all to reduce what it looked like.
This is the strength of the Sorcerer Supreme.
Blackheart had not moved. The Ancient One turned her hand over and waved at him, the way a person waves off a small nuisance.
San Venganza went into the Mirror Dimension entire.
The sky folded into facets. Every wall, tower and pile of rubble in the town repeated itself outward in reflections that leaned at angles the original could not hold. Then she swept her arm, and the ground of the plaza came apart into blocks and reassembled itself, moving like a living puzzle, carrying the Masters of Kamar-Taj away to the outer ring and leaving one clean floor at the centre with two people standing on it.
Blackheart watched the town rebuild itself around him following the rules of arithmetic.
She was further above him than anything he had been told to expect. He had one advantage left and it was distance, nothing she had shown so far had been done inside arm's reach.
He charged.
He crossed the arena at full speed with the ruined face leading and his hand already opening for her throat, and he was close enough to see the light on her scalp when the floor in front of her rose.
It came up as cubes, fist-sized, thousands of them locking to each other in no discernible order, and by the time he registered the shape it was a stone giant twice his height with its hand already coming down. The palm hit him across the shoulders and drove him into the arena floor, and the giant gave up its own body to do it. The cubes came apart in flight and closed on him where he lay, packing over his arms and legs and chest until only the ruined head was clear of the stone.
Blackheart roared into the ground.
The filaments came out of his scalp in a mass, swelled, and blew the stone off him in a shell of fragments. He came up out of the crater with the tentacles already reaching for her.
The Ancient One pushed her right hand forward.
Red light appeared in front of her palm, dense lines of it crossing and re-crossing into a net with no regular pattern anywhere in it, and the net travelled the length of the arena and passed through the filaments on its way. The tentacles came apart into segments the size of a fingernail. Every one of them, along their entire length, in a single pass. They fell into the standing water and lay there.
She stepped forward once and brought both hands together into a seal.
One hand came up and pointed at the sky. She held it, then swung the arm down and levelled it at Blackheart.
White lightning fell.
It came through the facets of the Mirror Dimension as though the dimension were not there, struck him from directly above, and went through his body and out the other side. Where it passed through the burn in his abdomen the wound flared and opened wider, and the fire the Rider had left in him climbed the channel the lightning had made.
Her other hand pointed at the ground and swept up to aim at him.
Deep purple lightning came out of the earth beneath his feet and wrapped him from below, and the two currents met around a body that could no longer close anything the fire had opened.
The Ancient One brought her palms together, and pressed down.
The white and the purple fused. What came out of the fusion did not look like either of them, and it arrived everywhere on him at once, and it went into the two wounds that had been held open for it since before she entered the fight.
Blackheart screamed, and the scream lost its shape, and so did he.
The body collapsed inward and became black ash in a volume far greater than the body had been, and the ash poured down into the ground and went through it, and San Venganza was silent again.
END CHAPTER 65