MAGUS INFINITE

Nineteen marks.

I had four minutes. Maybe five. The Law of Flesh was losing its fight with the green fire in my wounds, and the Law of Blood was doing what it could, but what it could do was not enough. Still, I was thankful. Without that second Law inside me, I would have been dead a while ago.

I was a body held together by Scripts and stubbornness, and both were running out.

Well, it was time to go crazier. As much as I wanted otherwise, I did not think I would be surviving this fight, so there was no reason to hold back.

Sixty-three... I wrote on the inside of my own mouth.

I am not joking. I had run out of hands and most of the surfaces of my body. Without my metallic bones keeping me in one shape, I would not have been able to move at all.

The god began moving towards me, wading through the dead, and I had the pen in my teeth for about half a second while I pulled myself out of a crevice with the one arm I still had. So I used the nib against the inside of my own cheek, and it hurt, and the Law of Flesh tried to correct it and could not, because green fire had got in there too, which was convenient for all the wrong reasons.

Sixty-four was on the flat of a slab I was thrown into.

Sixty-five was in the air itself, and it did not take, because I made a mistake, and I had to make it again on the way down.

No doubt my skills were growing, but I had shut off my notifications, because I could not afford the distraction. Any change in my capabilities would have held my attention long enough for the stranger to chop me into a thousand pieces.

Sixty-six was on the shoulder of a dead Beastkin that the god stepped on four seconds later, and I will admit I had not planned for that. There was a very bad moment before I understood that the mark had gone into the fleshy paste under its foot and was still, technically, in the right place.

∞

”You are slowing,” the stranger said. ”Your vitality matches a god, but how long can you last against the flames of the Necromancer?”

That was true. My left lung had stopped working an hour ago and the right one was scraps of meat. The stump of my right arm had grown back twice and been taken off twice, and the third time it came back thin and wrong, with the bones not where they should be, and the Law of Flesh had left it that way because there were more urgent errors to attend to.

I had no time to look in a mirror, but I knew that I had aged. Adamantium Titan and my Title were holding back the effects of ageing, but I could not resist the passage of time forever. Who knew how many years these green flames were forcing onto my body.

”You are going to die here,” the stranger sighed. ”You could have taken my offer, and I would have given you a quiet death. See all the gods in the realm of the Necromancer. All of them were once like you... stubborn.”

”Seventy,” I gasped.

”What?”

”Don’t mind me.”

Four claws came through the dark and took my left leg off above the knee.

Seventy-one, written on the floor with my own blood while I was still falling, since the pen was in my hand and pointed in roughly the right direction.

∞

The next ninety seconds cost me.

My leg did not come back. The Law of Flesh started it and gave up, and I spent the rest of that fight on one leg and a stump, dragging myself over a floor of burning corpses and broken stone.

I lost the sight in my left eye. I do not know to what. Something came through the dark and then it was dark on that side.

My hearing went entirely when the god brought both hands together on a slab I had been standing on, and it did not come back.

Seventy-two, seventy-three, seventy-four, all in a line along a fallen rib of the first spider leg I had severed, which was the only thing within reach that was not moving.

Seventy-five on the shell.

Seventy-six on a dead man’s teeth.

Seventy-seven, on the inside of the largest door, where the plain with the green sun was pouring its strange radiance into my tomb.

Four to go.

By all the lights in heaven, I was so tired.

∞

It was inevitable that I would make a mistake. There were too many things working against me, especially with no access to most of my soul and my magic. It was a miracle I had held on this long, but I slipped, did not move fast enough, and the stranger caught me with a hand around my throat.

He lifted me off the floor and brought the two faces up to mine. I could see the woman’s open mouth inside the man’s ruined cheek, and both of them were looking at me as if I were a particularly interesting specimen they had just caught.

”What is it,” the stranger said.

I could not hear it. After all, I had no hearing left. But a mouth is a mouth and I could read lips, and in any case there was only ever going to be one question.

”What is it you are making?”

I tried to answer and nothing came out but blood, and maybe it was because I still had the Death Stone on me, but the blood was red.

So I held up the pen instead, in a hand with four fingers missing, and I made the seventy-eighth mark on the back of his wrist, four inches from where his thumb was crushing my windpipe.

He did not stop me. He watched me do it. I think he believed I was finished, and I was simply too stubborn to stop. He turned his wrist slightly to let me finish, and I could feel the curiosity coming off that empty face. I knew he would have stopped me if I had been drawing a complete symbol, but I was not. It only looked like meaningless scribbles on his skin.

One thing I was learning about these immortal beings was that they were arrogant.

∞

Sighing in irritation, one hand snatched the Death Stone out of my pocket, and then he threw me.

I went four hundred yards and through a standing slab, and came to rest against the base of the north face of the pyramid, under the Scripts that had been burning there all night and were mostly dark now. I think my back was broken.

I lay there and looked up with my one eye at twelve miles of stone, and groaning with pain, I made the seventy-ninth mark on the wall beside my head.

Eighty, on my own chest, over the heart where the Law of Flesh and the Law of Blood beat together.

One left.