The portal opened onto dead ground and closed behind them with a sound like a struck wire.
San Venganza had been a town once. Now it was a grid of roofless adobe shells, a bell tower with no bell, and a plaza floored in dust that had not been walked on in a hundred and fifty years. Moonlight came down without obstruction. Every wall threw a hard black shadow and nothing moved inside any of them.
Kaecilius stepped through second and rolled his shoulders once, resettling his cloak. Daniel Drumm came last, checked the Sling Ring on his fingers, and slid it into an inner pocket where it could be reached in under a second.
Abel took the roof on the north side of the plaza. The adobe held his weight with a soft complaint. He crouched, set his palm flat on the parapet, and read the surface that contained old residue of dark energy that remained even after centuries.
The Ancient One arrived without a portal. She simply completed a step at the far end of the roof and was standing beside him, hands clasped behind her back, robes settling a half beat after she did.
Below and around them the Masters distributed. Thirty plus figures in mustard and slate, one to a rooftop, spaced at intervals that gave every one of them a clear casting line into the plaza and no clear line into each other. Wong took the east arc and began setting his stance early. Mordo took the west and did not look at anyone.
Nobody spoke. The wind came across the ruins and carried grit and nothing else.
Then the horizon caught fire.
A single line of flame crossed the desert flat, low and fast, laying burning tread marks that stayed lit behind it. The line resolved into a motorcycle.
Timber that had been dry for a century burst and scattered burning into the plaza. The bike came to a stop at the plaza's edge, and the rider dismounted while the flames were still climbing off him, the skull sinking back under skin, the chain around his torso ticking as the links cooled.
Johnny Blaze walked into the open with his hands loose at his sides.
Blackheart was already standing at the center of the plaza. Roxanne stood in front of him, upright, held there by a pale hand closed around her throat.
"If you dare transform, I kill her," Blackheart said. "Now. The contract Rider. Give it to me."
Johnny's right hand went to the chain across his chest and tightened it by one link. Then he reached inside his jacket and drew out a scroll. Black wooden axis. White paper. He held it where the moonlight could reach it and did not extend his arm.
"Let her go first," Johnny said. "Or you don't get it."
Blackheart looked at the scroll. Then he turned his head and looked at Roxanne, and blue black vapor rose out of his palm and went into her.
It moved under the skin. Her jaw, her cheek, her shoulder, the whole left side of her neck turned the grey of something three days dead. She did not scream. Her eyes closed and stayed closed, and her hands stayed open at her sides.
Abel's fingers found the seam of silver wire wrapped around the crack in his wand and stopped there, thumb resting on the splice.
"If I release her, you become the Rider, and that is inconvenient for me," Blackheart said. "Give me the contract. When I confirm it is genuine, I will release her."
"I don't trust you," Johnny said.
Blackheart smiled and increased the flow. The vapor spread until it covered most of her body, sitting there at full pressure without discharging, a hand held above a switch.
"Then you have already decided she is expendable."
Johnny's jaw worked once. He did not hand over the scroll. He threw it.
The throw was flat and high, passing directly over Roxanne's head, and it forced a choice with a duration of about half a second. Blackheart released her throat and caught the scroll.
The Mirror Dimension came up in the gap.
A single pane set between Roxanne and Blackheart at a range of forty centimetres. His aura hit it and folded back along the surface, unable to find edge or seam. Roxanne came off the ground, lifted by a levitation cast from the northeast roof, and a Kamar Taj sorceress caught her against her shoulder and was through a portal with her before Blackheart had finished turning his head.
Portals opened all around the plaza rim. Sorcerers stepped out onto the roofs that had been deliberately left empty, closing the perimeter to a full circle.
Blackheart looked at the scroll in his hand. He pulled the axis and let the paper run out.
Blank. Every centimetre of it.
The sound he made started below hearing and came up through the adobe. The forgery caught fire in his fist and was gone in under a second, ash falling through his fingers.
"Johnny. You dared to cheat me."
"Well you have to be prepared when you play games with a demon after all," Johnny said.
"I will kill you. I will kill every sorcerer standing on these roofs. Then I will draw your woman's soul out with my own hands and hold it beside yours for ten thousand years."
"Then start by living long enough to collect," Johnny said.
Then he burned.
Flesh went to bone between one word and the next, and the Ghost Rider crossed the plaza with the chain already unspooling, three loops taken around his right fist so the links sat across the knuckles like a weighted glove. Blackheart came to meet him.
The impact produced an airburst.
It went out flat across the plaza, lifted the dust into a ring, and cracked two standing walls at their bases. Abel's coat snapped against his legs and he set his back foot to hold position.
The Rider pressed first. Hellfire erupted out of the ribcage in a sheet and wrapped Blackheart from shoulder to hip, and the effect was real. Skin blackened and split and ran. It was also temporary. The damage closed at a rate Abel could measure by eye, a burn depth of centimetres sealing inside two seconds, and it kept closing while the fire was still on him.
Blackheart answered with the aura. It came off his back in a mass, took the shape of a clawed hand, and swatted the Rider across the plaza and through a standing wall. The wall took him in and did not let him out immediately.
Then Blackheart stopped holding the human shape.
The pale skin went blue black. Spines came up through the shoulders and forearms. The jaw split wider than a jaw should and filled with teeth in ranks. Crooked lines spread across the body in a pattern that did not repeat. Out of the scalp grew a mass of long thin filaments, hair only by category, and they moved behind his head with independent intent.
Red eyes went around the perimeter, counted the roofs, and stopped on the north side, where the Ancient One stood with her hands still behind her back.
"Every devil in hell has heard the legends surrounding the Sorcerer Supreme that carries strength to match a lord of hell," he said. "Looking at you now, you don't seem so impressive."
"Appearances can be misleading," stated the Ancient One. "This dimension is not yours to take. Go on your way and forget the contract."
"When I have made the surface my kingdom, I will return to hell of my own accord," he said. "And on that day I will rule both."
The filaments launched on the last syllable, extending across sixty metres of open air toward the north roof.
They stopped forty centimetres from her face.
A mandala had assembled there, threads of fire in a lattice dense enough to read as solid, and it had assembled between two words of his sentence. Abel had been watching her hands the entire time. Two fingers of the left hand had moved. Nothing else.
The perimeter cast in unison.
Thirty plus pairs of hands moved through the same sequence, and the plaza filled from six directions at once. A mandala the width of the plaza forming overhead. A sixth beneath his feet, driving down through the dust and locking against the ground.
A cube. Six walls, no seam, no exit vector.
Inside it the threads deployed. They came off the inner surfaces in the hundreds, crossed, and wrapped him from the spines down, binding the arms to the ribs, the filaments to the skull, the legs together at the knee. The lattice tightened until the shape inside it stopped being able to make a shape.
The Ghost Rider came out of the broken wall, shook the adobe off his shoulders, and stood watching the cube with the chain hanging slack from his fist.
Inside the cube, Blackheart began to laugh.
"Did you believe I failed to notice your arrangement with the Rider," he said. "Did you believe I came here alone."
Abel turned before the sentence finished, because the sound had already started, and it was coming from every compass point at once. Water. Enough water to make a river.
The moonlight went out of the plaza, blocked by the sheer volume of H2O traveling the ruins.
On all four sides of San Venganza the desert stood up. Walls of black water climbed past the rooftops, past the bell tower, and kept climbing, and as they reached their height the four faces leaned inward and resolved into one face, a single vast snarling demon skull assembled out of moving water, jaws open above the town.
It came down.
END CHAPTER 62