Sylver Seeker Book 8
Chapter 1 (292) - Please Listen
Through whatever means Countess Camilla was using to view them, she saw the thing sitting in the cage made of light, and had the small girl that had opened the door brought back so she could close it.
The thing in the cage didn’t make a sound or move a “muscle” while that happened. It just sat there, slumped over, seemingly oblivious to its surroundings.
Sylver and Nels were brought directly into Countess Camilla’s office, sat down on the two chairs in front of her table, and just quietly sat there as she looked at them without actually looking at them.
She didn’t have that slack jawed expression certain clairvoyants Sylver knew made when they tried to stay relaxed while peering into the future.
But she didn’t look like she was tensing or struggling against anything either, she was just calmly sitting there, not even deep in thought, she looked like she was just waiting in line for something.
When she eventually opened her mouth a thin wisp of steam escaped from her lips.
“How do you know that’s a demon lord?” Countess Camilla asked.
Sylver had to think about it for a second, and decided that the best way to handle this is to be as honest and direct as he could be.
“The stronger a demon is, the more human it appears. And if I saw that walking around outside, I would have walked right past it. Aside from that… I am able to sense and see souls. And that was the soul of a demon lord,” Sylver said.
“But you don’t know for certain that’s a demon lord?” Countess Camilla asked.
He’d had very similar conversations with clairvoyants in the past, where they asked very basic and obvious questions, and then heard an answer they didn’t like and asked the same question over again. Although given that Countess Camilla had an entire army behind her, Sylver couldn’t do what he usually did when a clairvoyant refused to accept his answer.
“Due to the holy artifacts in the room, no. I can’t say for certain that’s a demon lord,” Sylver said.
There was no reaction from her, almost as if she hadn’t heard what he had said.
“What happens if it is a demon lord, and somehow it gets out?” Countess Camilla asked.
“If it is a demon lord, in a physical body, nobody here will be able to stop it. It will take the life of every single living being inside Merol, and will use their bodies to host its generals and soldiers. And a few days or weeks after everyone is properly settled in, it will send the generals and soldiers out to lay waste to the continent,” Sylver said in a dry and calm voice.
“What else could it be other than a demon lord?” Countess Camilla asked.
He had to wait a moment before he answered.
“At the absolute least it’s a named demon. Maybe its back is covered in scales and it isn’t as perfectly human as it appears, but just being 90% of the way there, no visible wings or horns, means it is significantly closer to a demon lord, than to a feral demon, or an imp. The only way to know it’s beyond a doubt a demon lord is to check its eyes, those are always the last thing to change,” Sylver explained.
“What happens if it’s a named demon, and it somehow gets out?” Countess Camilla asked.
“For a demon to possess a name it must have been recognized and named by a demon lord in the past. If a demon lord is capable of destroying a continent, a named demon is capable of destroying multiple countries. So even if that’s just a named demon, all of Merol would be dead in under a minute, maybe less,” Sylver explained, calmly, and without raising his voice.
He waited a moment before he continued.
“Having said that, all named demons possess the capacity to summon the demon lord they serve into this realm. Isolated as this place is, even the weakest named demon would be more than enough to kill everyone in Merol, and then it would slowly use the souls it gathered to summon its lord. Then generals and soldiers are sent out to lay waste to the continent,” Sylver said with a circular hand motion.
He didn’t get the sense Countess Camilla was really listening to him, let alone hearing, or comprehending what he was saying. She was looking at him, but he could see in her eyes she was also looking through him.
Clairvoyancy, especially on the level Countess Camilla likely practiced, had self imposed limitations and rules to make their sights and predictions more accurate and consistent than they otherwise would be.
The limitations functioned like a catalyst in a sense, it made certain parts of her clairvoyancy stronger, but in exchange made other parts weaker, slower, or downright blocked them and caused blind spots.
There was a good chance right now the people she would have consulted on this matter were walking around with a vague memory of a conversation they never had.
“Demons make deals. Could we make a deal with this demon?” Countess Camilla asked.
The voice was hers, but the tone and pattern of speech was someone else’s.
He tried to find the best words to use to get his point across as clearly as possible.
This wasn’t… She “knew” this was dangerous, but she didn’t know.
How could she? All of this was just words. The difference between knowing an earthquake is when the earth shakes under your feet, and actually experiencing one first hand.
“It is possible to make a deal with any demon… But not this one,” Sylver explained.
“Why can’t we make a deal with this demon?” Countess Camilla asked.
“It’s a demon lord,” Sylver repeated.
She started asking her next question before he finished speaking.
“If we were able to make a deal with it, what would it want in the worst case scenario?” Countess Camilla asked.
He waited before he spoke again, to slow the pace of the conversation down, so if she was actually paying attention she would have more time to think through and digest what he was saying.
“It depends on whether or not the demon is needed every day to power the barrier, whether it is used as fuel or a catalyst, or if you only need it to turn on the barrier once. Best case scenario, it would want a hundred thousand dead babies. Worst case? Personal proclivities play a role, but for the sake of argument, let's say a hundred million children between the ages of five and ten,” Sylver said, calmly, almost casually.
Once again, her next question left her mouth before Sylver was fully finished speaking.
“Where are you getting these numbers?” she asked.
“I’m making them up.”
“Why dead babies?” she asked with the tone of an old woman.
“It’s a good unit of measurement.”
“One hundred million?” she asked with the tone of a young man.
“Yes.”
“Why?” Countess Camilla asked, this one was directly from her.
He, as pointless as this was, waited a little before he answered her.
“It’s a demon LORD!” Sylver said a little louder on the off chance she was hard of hearing, “I understand that in your head it’s just a really powerful mage, but the chasm between you, us, and it, is the difference between us and an ant! This is a thing that’s so powerful gods have to get involved to stop it!”
He moved his hands around a lot as he spoke, and made gestures as if Eirish wasn’t her first language.
“But it’s in a cage us ants built,” Countess Camilla said.
Sylver could almost hear the man who’d given her that rebuttal to use.
“Us ants didn’t build anything. I can guarantee you a [Hero] was involved in making that cage, which is to say, a god or gods might as well have built it,” Sylver said while looking right at her.
She blinked for the first time since he’d sat down and looked at her.
He could almost see the mana around her head flickering with every connection she made and cut off when it didn’t give her the answer she wanted.
“The demon lord is a non-starter,” Sylver said, repeated even, since that was what he had been saying this whole time.
“It’s the only option,” Countess Camilla said immediately, like it was a reflex.
Sylver sat up straighter in his seat, and had the shade Nels’ head was attached to do the same.
“Look… Let’s try this from a different angle. Can we agree that even if that isn’t a demon lord, it’s at the very least extremely dangerous, if it managed to get out of the cage?” Sylver asked.
Surprisingly Countess Camilla didn’t need to mull that question over.
“Yes, it’s very dangerous,” Countess Camilla said.
“Alright, perfect. Now, you can see the future, correct?” Sylver asked.
Under different circumstances he may have gotten a kick out of catching a clairvoyant off guard with such a simple question.
“Yes,” Countess Camilla said stiffly.
“And you can see the future that involves you directly more clearly than the future of someone on the other side of the Asberg, correct?” Sylver asked.
“Yes,” Countess Camilla said.
She didn’t squint at him, but Sylver could physically see the tension in her shoulders pulling her forwards.
“If the demon lord, or named demon, gets out of that cage, it will affect everyone in Eira, correct?”
“If it is… Yes, it would,” she said.
He could see in her eyes that she knew exactly what he was about to say, but he said it anyway.
“Stop me when I’m wrong. You are not the only clairvoyant in Eira. The High King has clairvoyants under him. The second anybody puts themselves on the path where the potential for the demon lord to get out exists, at the absolute minimum every single clairvoyant on this side of the Asberg will sense the giant change in their near future. And once that happens it isn’t a question of “if” the High King will send someone to prevent it, it’s a question of when,” Sylver said, and at no point did Countess Camilla tell him he was wrong.
And yet, he could tell that even though he was right, and she very well might have agreed with him, on a purely objective basis-
“I need the barrier that room produces. Can we work around the demon lord?” Countess Camilla asked.
“No.” Sylver said.
“Then we’ll need to work with or through him,” Countess Camilla said.
“See, there it is, “him.” You’re not getting it, that thing may have the appearance of a man, but I clearly don’t have the vocabulary to convey just how far away it is from a regular human man. You can’t work around it because you can’t guarantee you won’t accidentally release it, and you can’t work through or with it, because it’s a demon lord. Forget about that room. It’s a dead end, it might as well not exist,” Sylver said.
Countess Camilla made the polite gesture of pretending to listen to him while he spoke, she even nodded along a little, and took a big pause as if she was seriously thinking through what he had said.
“What would you need to make it work?” Countess Camilla asked.
“If we’re talking about creating a new barrier, I can give you a very long and incredibly expensive list of components and catalysts, along with blueprints that will take your wizards about eight years to build,” Sylver said.
“What do you need to make this demon powered barrier work?” she clarified.
“It’s not possible,” Sylver said.
“Why isn’t it possible?”
“It’s just not.”
“Why not?”
“Because it is a de-mon-lo-re-de,” Sylver enunciated each and every syllable because at this point the only way she wasn’t getting it was that there was a language barrier.
An entire minute of silence passed after that.
And in that minute Countess Camilla sat there and talked to more people than most people had seen in their whole lives.
“No,” Countess Camilla said calmly, almost with a smile, but it wasn’t in her calm face or eyes, just a smudge of a smile in her voice. It wasn’t smugness, it was something small and subtle that he couldn’t put a name to.
“No?” Sylver asked.
“No,” countess Camilla repeated.
“Look-” his fingers passed through the wooden edge of the table he tried to hold like the solid oak was made of brittle chalk, splinters and sawdust exploded into the air, “-the impossible is always impossible right up until someone does it. But this isn’t that,” Sylver said.
“I understand-”
“Shut the fuck up for a second-there isn’t-this isn’t-the paradox here is that anyone who would be capable of doing this, would know enough not to attempt it. And anyone who would attempt it, doesn’t know what the fuck they’re doing!” Sylver said, hands balled into white knuckled fists, and his voice on the edge of turning into a stutter.
Nels spoke up in the short pause he took.
“The High King isn’t the only one who would find out about this from clairvoyants. You’ll have other religions and all manner of people, groups, even deities, coming after you the moment you or anyone so much as puts their finger on the first domino. Even monsters might feel something coming and hone in on Merol and attack it,” Nels said.
“What could possibly be so horrible and catastrophic that you think a barrier, powered by a demon lord, is the only solution?” Sylver asked.
It was a genuine question too.
But instead of trying to explain herself, Countess Camilla just sat there, with her thin hands daintily clasped together in front of her.
“You have given me a great deal to think about, thank you,” Countess Camilla said.
Sylver felt a warm wind run up the back of his head, and turned around to look at Scilla’s curtain portal, which connected to the street outside the house they were staying in.
There was an audible, leathery, sound as Sylver turned back around and “looked” at Camilla.
“I won’t do anything without consulting you first. I swear it on my name,” Countess Camilla said calmly, as she just looked at him.
Briefly, but it did happen, he considered walking up to her and ripping her head off her shoulders.
But… He couldn’t do that… Not unless Edmund was here to protect him, and more importantly, Nels, from the consequences.
The shade Nels’ head was attached to followed him through the portal with a stiff legged limp.
The house was empty, Klara and the other went to see her aunt for cookware.
Sylver’s hand left a visible dent in the metal door handle as he turned it, and when he sat down on one of the chairs in the kitchen, the wood made a whining noise as he sat down on it and couldn’t maintain the spell meant to prevent his weight from breaking through everything he stepped and sat on.
Both of his hands were laying palms downwards flat on the table, his torso looked like he was sucking in his stomach, and his eyes were locked in the direction of the closed window next to the front door, but he wasn’t actually looking at it.
This was really, really, really bad.
A completely and fully manifested demon lord with a physical vessel that it had likely had lifetimes to adjust to, was a five archmage job, maybe six depending on the archmages available.
Between Sylver, Nels, even with a body armed with the best staff this city had to offer, and Edmund, together they maybe made up a fifth of a singular proper archmage, maybe, and Edmund made up more than half of that fifth.
Worse than anything else, not only was the demon lord beyond that fucking woman’s comprehension and ability, at this moment, it was beyond Sylver’s ability too.
The Ibis made mistakes, missed things, but it had never, never, never, in its existence ever let something like this happen without nipping it in the bud so early that often it didn’t even warrant being noted down properly by the time it was over.
It was a holy barrier, he could barely look at it, let alone do anything to it without fat fingering the presumably delicate balance of light and colours that are somehow keeping the demon lord at bay.
They were lucky just opening the door didn’t break something, light, fucking light of all things to contain a demon lord… It made sense in that light wouldn’t deteriorate over time, and could interact with the demon lord without him being able to interact with the light in return, but…
What do I do now?
He couldn’t even ask the question calmly, he was screaming in his own head.
The obvious solution was to kill the stupid woman, kill her advisors, kill her guards, kill everyone in Merol just to be safe, figure out who the priests that knew about the demon lord talked to outside of Merol and kill them too, and the priests here of course… And then get obliterated by the High King’s court mage…
No, the whole thing can be filed under plan B for now.
Also, what if the priests were maintaining the barrier somehow? Is the girl that opened the door just a key, or is she part of the mechanism for the barrier? Questions he could have asked that clairvoyant girl if he hadn’t slipped and made no attempt to catch himself…
How did she know about the barrier in the first place?
Someone would have had to have told her about it, this wasn’t the sort of information she could have pulled out of the air, someone in the future would have told her about it?
Unless she only found out about the barrier when she got here?
She looked at every city and path, and this was the only city that wasn’t a dead end in her eyes…
Even though he was staring in the direction of the doorway, it took Sylver a good few seconds to actually focus his vision after Spring nudged him.
Prune was standing in the doorway.
Sylver also now noticed that someone had torn the door off its hinges and had thrown it so hard against the wall that there was a hole in it, and woodchips sprinkled all over the floor of the house.
Prune had an odd look on her face, and now that he looked at her too, Nels had a similar look, but he was too in his head to figure out what the looks meant right now.
Prune saw that Sylver was actually looking at her instead of the wall behind her, and she all but shook her head to snap out of whatever had made her freeze up the way she did.
But even after regaining her composure, she just stared at Sylver and didn’t say anything.
“Would you like some coffee?” Sylver asked with a gesture towards the stove, where the pot of coffee had frozen and shattered the pot from the fluid expanding.
Looking around the room and the house, the windows were frosted over too, and there were small icicles hanging from the ceiling.
All the small shadows in the building were all a great deal darker than they had any right to be, Spring had moved the shades out of Sylver’s shadow and spread them out along the house for some reason.
“Would you like some coffee?” Sylver asked, with a gesture towards the stove.
“Did you need something Prune?” Nels asked, slightly louder than necessary. She probably could also hear the very loud ringing Sylver was hearing.
“The-” Prune took a very short quick breath “I’ve been told to bring the float-boat in. I wanted to know when you two would be ready to come with us to get it,” Prune said.
Sylver realized he hadn’t stood up from the chair he was sitting on, he’d only turned his head to look at her, and had turned his head a little too far relative to the limitations of a human neck.
His chest wasn’t moving to give the impression of breathing, and he wasn’t completely certain of this, but he was pretty sure he hadn’t opened his mouth when he spoke to her.
He made his chest expand and contract as he stood up from the chair, made his eyelids move up and down, and used his hands to move the small strands of hair hanging over his face back into place.
The timing of Prune coming here was suspicious… Or it could be as simple as her having someone watch the house with orders to find her when Sylver returned. It wasn’t like he paid any attention to his surroundings when he came here.
The light coming in through the window and wide open doorway looked off to him, and upon being asked, Spring said that since they returned, Sylver had sat in complete and total silence for well over two hours.
And he had nothing to show for it.
There wasn’t an angle here, he didn’t have anything to barter with that would be anywhere close to the demon lord powered barrier the clairvoyant was convinced was necessary.
He couldn’t threaten her, he certainly couldn’t actually kill her, the best he could do was send a message to the High King so he would send someone down here to kill everyone.
The best he could do was hope the High King would send someone down here to kill everyone, and not kill Sylver just to be safe.
Even though if he were in the High King’s shoes, a necromancer, especially of such a high caliber as Sylver was, would be first on the list of people to get rid of to prevent a demon lord from being summoned. Honestly, if the High King didn’t have whoever he sent try to kill him, Sylver would think less of the man...
The worst part was, he wasn’t outsmarted, out maneuvered, out skilled, or out anythinged, the mere presence of the demon lord limited Sylver’s movements so heavily that bitch might as well be actively holding a knife to everybodies’ throats while she poured oil on the boat they were all standing on and was questioning Sylver how best to set everything alight.
And now Prune was here with the stupid float-boat, as if Sylver was a rowdy dog that needed to be taken out on a walk to calm him down…
Was the whole thing a distraction? Why waste so much time and energy on something mobile if the end goal is to hunker down inside a barrier and… Actually, he didn’t know what her plan was, he would go as far as to say he couldn’t fully remember what he had said that made her show him the door.
Almost like it didn’t belong to him, a thought appeared in his head, and he saw a way he could balance the scales a little, enough to maybe prevent a realm ending catastrophe from occurring in the realm he currently resided in.
The float boat was designed by a dwarf…
As far as “plans” went this was crude, even by his standards, but trying to outwit a clairvoyant was a fool’s errand, at least for the moment he couldn’t see why this couldn’t work, which was good enough.
Something must have changed about the way Sylver stood, or there was something in his voice that he hadn’t intended and couldn’t himself hear, but whatever it was it smoothed out the slight scowl on Nels’ face.
“We’ll meet you at the front gate in an hour. I just need to pack some things and then talk to Lostal to tell him we’re leaving,” Sylver said.