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As for our enemies, the Seven Brothers were waiting for us, each of them standing like slack-jawed statues in front of one of the room’s seven walls– including the one with the door we’d just blasted through on our way inside. Their eyes were closed, but their mouths hung open, drool dribbling down their chins.
‘What are they doing?’ Galass asked.
‘Perhaps the gate failed,’ Aradeus suggested, ‘and now they’re frozen in some kind of mystical sleep?’
Corrigan strode forward, my recruitment spell barely holding him any more– although whether that was because of the lightning that had nearly killed him or my own guilt, I couldn’t be sure. ‘Good,’ he said, sticking his face so close to the tallest of the brothers their noses almost touched. ‘Let’s kill them all and be done with it.’ He glanced in my direction, but didn’t meet my eye as he added, ‘Unless my master has other plans?’
I carefully navigated the shifting floor until I was standing in front of the brother I’d sat opposite at our previous meeting. He looked so still, so. . . uninterested. These bastards had tried to give over the realm of their birth to the Pandorals, and now they just slouched there like drunks without even the decency to float above the floor?
Alice joined me, but when she reached out a clawed hand towards the brother nearest her, I grabbed her wrist.
‘Never touch me, human,’ she snarled. ‘Not without my consent.’
I let go of her wrist. ‘You appear to be fine with the idea of touchingthemwithout their consent,’ I pointed out.
I reached into the pocket of my coat in search of something I could afford to lose, and found the pipe I’d used in the village. I tried to press the broken stem into the chest of the brother in front of me, but it was like pushing a toothpick against diamond.
‘A shield spell of some sort?’ Aradeus asked.
I tapped the stem against the loose robes, with the same result. ‘Stronger than anything I’ve ever seen cast,’ I said.
‘So what now?’ Galass asked. ‘Is it over? Have we. . . won?’
I didn’t have an answer, partly because the floor was rippling again and I had to concentrate on not falling. I was having difficulty not throwing up too; the nausea was getting worse and my hands were trembling. Soon I wouldn’t have the coordination to cast spells. Alice had predicted we had about half an hour before our feeble human bodies fell apart from the effects of the warping magic all around us– who would have thought the demon was an optimist?
‘What if Corrigan hits them with lightning?’ Galass suggested.
‘Finally, someone has an idea worth trying,’ he said, stepping back several feet before unleashing enough aetheric lightning to obliterate a mountain. When that failed, he tried again, and again– but it had no effect. He might as well have been trying to drown the brothers by spitting at them repeatedly.
Alice went next, striking them with her whip blade, which I was pretty sure could cut through any normal substance. She had no luck, either.
With some considerable effort, Shame pushed open one of the tall glass windows. ‘The grounds around the fortress are shifting, too,’ she reported. ‘The effects are starting to spread.’
‘But how?’ Aradeus asked. I noticed his hand was reaching for the hilt of his rapier, only to pull back again, as if aware a blade wouldn’t serve any purpose here, yet unsure what else to do with himself. ‘The brothers clearly haven’t finished the gate, so why is their magic still affecting this place?’
Fidick cried out, and we turned away from the window to see him doubled over, the fingers of his hands pressing into his skull.
‘What’s wrong?’ Galass demanded, running to him.
‘My head hurts. I think. . . I think someone’s coming—’
I spun around again, expecting to see the brothers suddenly awake and some sort of magical gate appearing in the air, but they hadn’t moved. They were just standing there, as they had been since we’d entered the ever-shifting room, eyes closed and mouths hanging open. I stepped closer, searching, I suppose, for some sign of emotion on their faces– despair or satisfaction, or anything. Then I peered inside inside the eldest brother’s open jaws– and saw something crawling on the back of his tongue.
‘Get back!’ I cried, jumping to one side. I felt a deep chill inside me that I couldn’t blame on the sickness assailing us.
‘What is it?’ Aradeus asked. Now he had drawn his rapier and was waving it around, searching for the new threat.
‘The brothersdidfinish building the gates,’ I whispered. ‘We were just looking in the wrong place.’
First I saw the little antennae, like those of a locust, peeking out from behind the brother’s front teeth, then the segmented eyes and twig-like limbs, each one no longer than a fingernail. An insect, its translucent wings pressed to the back of its coppery shell, crawled across the brother’s tongue before dropping from his mouth to the floor. The creature turned left and right, as if finding its bearings, then just lay there.
‘What is it?’ Galass asked. ‘Is that one of the Pandorals?’
I remembered how I’d heard a buzzing in my ears whenever the brothers were casting their spells.
‘There’s another one,’ Alice warned as another insect identical to the first crawled out of the next brother’s mouth. This one stood with its front legs on his lips for a moment before it too jumped.
‘There are more,’ Shame said, but she didn’t need to tell us, for the insects were appearing from all of the brothers’ mouths now, first one at a time, then by the dozen, crawling over each other to get out more quickly, then joining their brethren on the ground.
