This city was Tambelon, and it lay divorced from the material plane only by a soap-bubble. Its bleak expanse was occupied by a toiling multitude, and from its high peak the black city all was ready, in its foundries where the most fiendish works of mortal ingenuity had been studied and augmented with ageless malice the toiling workers were at a fever pitch, in its scholarly streets the city’s intellectual leaders re-checked their calculations and in the high windowless spires the shadowbinders pulled the threads of reality taut.
The hour-long appointed had come, the auspicious hour, the time to return to the world of light.
Narus walked the streets with the habitual furtiveness of one who was accustomed to toil and fear, the word had come forth but he had not relished it, for the hour appointed had long been his fear. The guardians of the city were everywhere, and though he had lived from his birth in the shadow of fear, he had long harboured thought in his mind that outside the endless fortress’ master had lied; for there was nothing good in Tambelon.
He passed by a brazier where coal, as abundant as the water here, lit a small circle around the gateway; a guard stood watchful and Narus averted his gaze, not meeting the guard’s eye, let alone the Hounds penned in runic iron behind him. The guard carried a flame lance that served as an electric goad to ensure that the creatures, penned here where they could not pass outward, could not gnaw their way through the bars.
Further on a temple blazed with the light of fires within and the redolent chiming of the great bells within and Narus shunned it, but made the ritual supplication as he did, wary still of the guard’s eye upon him.
The street broke open and he could see the great black centre of the city, he made a small gesture beneath his cloak, a defiance to the Lord of Tambelon.
The city shook, rumbling again, the soft ripple of a mild earthquake, the work of the Lord, and Narus felt for a moment the dark architect of Tambelon had seen him, and he hurried onward before he heard it. The convulsions in the ground were faster to cross the city than the sound; the sound was too small a word.
He pressed his palms to his ears as if to push them back into his head, the thrum of the Sound echoed out across the city, splitting the sky and splitting the soul, it was a terrible thing, and Narus fell to his knees. The city had been forbidden to use glass in construction long ago, every window was barred with black iron, even the estates of the wealthy were like prisons in that regard, for just this moment. Narus’ ears tore at him, and his bones throbbed, his skin burned in the sound and though he could not hear the cries, he could see the others in the city were no less affected than he. Even the Hounds, terrible things, curled in their cage in stark terror, their ember-eyes wide and fearful.
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The mountains broke to the Sound, the terrible peal echoing in the material plane with a far greater power, the earthquakes that had merely trembled the shadow buildings broke mountains and caused avalanches for hundreds of miles, the sun trembled in the sky and hid its face, clouds that had been wisps of white grew to animate blackness as if they were bubbles boiled over from a cooking pot, and expanded across the sky. The Sound flew through the sky and the earth, sounding from the deepest darkness.
Across the nation of Kouralia it could be heard, and the Malgravean colony across the oceanic bay, the Earth trembled and heaved, an earthquake unlike anything seen in the region in aeons, the earth heaved and convulsed, shifting as the ground churned, and the ocean fell and then swelled.
To the mages of the region, disruption of Mana lashed out of the realm, disaster upon disaster lashed the realms as a hurricane of magical force poured out, following the sound, intensifying the power of mages throughout the region.
The most spectacular effect of the Bell was not the earthquake or the storms, nor even the magical cataclysm that swept out from the Black City.
It was the breaking; in all directions, glass smashed, windows becoming shrapnel, glasses cut hands open, and spectacles cut into eyes and faces as they splintered at once. The Sound took this and more, for it had another effect; this one was the true mastery of the magical arts its creator possessed made manifest.
Axles broke for thousands of miles in all directions; it was a carefully calculated blow, for nature did not have free-turning wheels, but they were the principle of Order made manifest, so much machinery was based on the simple principle of one part of a machine turning upon another. In stationary vehicles, drive shafts and axles and even steering columns broke like shattered glass, steel and even wood blasted to flinders by the Sound.
The effect went up and down in scale; the drive shafts of ships at sea were burst, while the smallest axles within tiny medical devices were sundered, even the hammer pins of some firearms broke. More than a few people dependent on medical implants died at once, an atrocity that was plainly the work of a profound and embittered malice.
Planes fell from the sky, trains derailed, and elevators slammed into emergency stop positions across the continent, turbofans were scrapped and ailerons fouled. Computers dependent on movable media were instantly fouled and the machinery of industrial society was instantly set back centuries throughout the continent.
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And it was not the only terror that was inflicted by the Sound, for it roused the dead, the buried dead and the recently dead alike stirred, mindlessly animate, zombies were not a great military asset, but without much of the technology that would warn the lands around them of what was happening, they would provide a diversion, a simple enough spell to thread into the great magics that had brought the Black City into the real world.
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As the Sound crossed the bay, the Black City had arrived, its malicious bulk pressing the mountains down where it had not been before; it was only the first of several malicious works in the campaign of terror planned by the Lord of Tambelon.
The click of the Lord’s hooves on stone enchanted to the strength of structural steel echoed from the campanile, the great artefact, the work of countless centuries of perfection, shone, its bronze shape gleaming, it still shook from the magic wrought through it, the instrument of such profound destruction was an artefact of rare power, and it was heavily guarded within the Lord’s personal chambers.
Grogar stepped back from it to admire the work he had done, the light that flowed in from the louvred windows was new, Celestia’s hated light, he had not seen it for centuries, but he loathed it no less now than he had before.
“Let the hounds slip into the ether and open the gates,” he commanded, “prepare to seed the oceans,” he said, “time is wasting.”
