Of the three, the Water Demon kept the lowest profile and carried the most strength.
Rain gave it to him. So did a lake, a river, a coastline. Anywhere water stood in quantity his output climbed, and in New York the Wind Demon and the Earth Demon had held the ground advantage and still ranked under him. San Venganza sat in desert. It also sat inside a bend of river channels and standing water that no living person had bothered to map, and every one of them had just arrived at once.
The torrent came down across the plaza and broke the formation on contact.
Mandalas that had held a devil in a six-walled cube came apart at the seams as the load arrived from outside their geometry. The remaining shells of the village went under and stayed under. Masters were lifted off the roofs they had chosen with care and carried in four directions, scattered across a flood that had been dust ninety seconds earlier.
Abel went to black smoke before the water reached the parapet and rose clear of it. The wave passed underneath him, took the north wall out from the base, and kept going.
The Ancient One did not move at all. A barrier stood open around her, invisible except where the current split against it and rejoined behind her heels, and she watched the water run past her boots with her hands still behind her back.
Kaecilius braced and shaped a wedge that put the flow around himself and Daniel Drumm both. Wong drove a mandala flat into the surface and used it as a floor. Mordo, using the Vaulting Boots of Valtorr took the pair nearest him, locked his stance, and held the three of them against a current that had already carried away sorcerers.
The Ghost Rider was the one it caught clean.
He had come out of the wall with the chain slack in his fist and no cover on any side. The water took him across the plaza at the speed of the wave front, put him through the doorway of a standing house on the west arc, and buried the doorway behind him under everything the street had been carrying.
The Ancient One brought her hands forward and struck them apart.
Threads of fire came off her fingers in the dozens and went out low across the water, each one finding a body in the flood. Where a thread landed it opened into a shell, and the mage inside the shell stopped tumbling, found orientation, and came up out of the current with his stance recovered. She placed every one of them without turning her head to look.
The flow steadied. The plaza became a shallow marsh with debris standing in it at angles.
Behind Blackheart the water gathered itself.
It rose in a column, then in a shape, and by the time it finished rising it was a giant standing at the height of the vanished bell tower, built out of moving water with a mouth full of teeth cut from the same material. The mouth opened and put a sound across the ruins that carried intent and very little else.
The marsh answered it. Ripples opened across the surface in the hundreds, and out of every ripple came a devil, dark red or the blue black of the thing that had made them, and they came up howling with the specific hunger of creatures that have been promised a meal.
Abel held position in the smoke and counted.
The Earth Demon had brought a horde into New York. This one ran better than ten times that number, and the count was the smaller problem. Spread through the mass were individuals with real load behind them, bodies that moved with purpose instead of appetite, and against thirty plus Masters with the Ancient One anchoring them the arithmetic still worked. It stopped working quickly.
The version of Blackheart that Abel carried in memory from another life had been a sulking heir with a knife. This one was Mephisto's construction and a prince of a hell dimension, and he had arrived with an army and a second in command holding the terrain. Whatever he had watched on a screen once had been a fraction, badly drawn.
A house on the west arc detonated from the inside.
Hellfire came out through the roof and the windows at the same instant, and the water lying against the walls flashed off in a ring. The Ghost Rider walked out through the gap he had made with the chain already burning along its length.
He put his eyeless skull toward Blackheart and the water giant and let out a roar, and the fire on him climbed until Abel could feel the heat arriving at altitude.
Then he went to work. The chain came off his shoulder in a loop, took a half collapsed house across the middle, and the hellfire crossed from the links to the adobe in under a second. He turned once at the hips and released, and the house went across the plaza on a rising arc, burning the whole way.
The Water Demon answered with a column driven up out of the marsh. Water could not put hellfire out. It could stand in the way of several tonnes of masonry, and it did. The column caught the house, absorbed the arc, and dropped it short in a bank of steam that whited out the middle of the plaza.
Blackheart came through the steam without waiting for it to clear.
He crossed the distance in one movement, took the burning that came with contact, and closed his hand around the Rider's skull. The slam put the Rider through the surface of the marsh and into the ground under it. The filaments behind Blackheart's head extended, took hold of the boulders and standing wall sections nearest them, tore them out of the earth and brought them down one after another until the place where the Rider had been was under a mound of stone.
Blackheart straightened and opened his mouth to say something.
A chain came out of the mound.
It went around his neck at speed, locked, and pulled, and he went into the stone headfirst with the whole mound collapsing inward behind him. What came back out came out backward and fast. Blackheart landed on his shoulder in the shallow water with the right side of his face burning, flesh gone, bare bone showing along the cheek and orbit.
The mound shifted and the Ghost Rider stood up out of it.
Where he walked, the ground stopped being ground. Stone melted and ran, and the melt pooled at his boots and flowed away from him in slow bright lines. Boulders that had fallen near him softened at the edge and slumped before they could finish falling. He came clear of the rubble and kept walking, and the marsh retreated from him in every direction.
Blackheart got his feet under him. The right side of his face was already closing, bone taking cover again at a rate that made the injury look like something borrowed rather than sustained.
He looked at the fire wrapped around the thing walking toward him, and he gave his order to the horde standing ready at his back.
"All of you. Kill the human sorcerers. Now."
The devils broke toward the roofs and the shallows where the Masters had re-formed.
The Ancient One brought her hands together and drew them apart, and a mandala opened in each palm in the shape of a folding fan. She went forward first, ahead of every mage on the field, and gave her own order as she moved.
"Destroy these demons. Stay alive while you do it."
The fan in her right hand took two devils across the throat on one pass and she did not slow for either of them. She went through the gap they left and drove straight at Blackheart and the giant behind him.
The Ghost Rider saw the line she had chosen and took it with her, closing from the other side.
Neither of them arrived.
The water giant received a signal from Blackheart and gave up its shape, and every channel, pool and river bend within reach of San Venganza came up out of its bed at once and joined what was already there. The flood stopped behaving like a flood. It rose into walls, and the walls closed, and each wall enclosed a separate pocket of the battlefield with somebody sealed inside it.
The Ancient One went into one. The Ghost Rider went into another. Abel, still at altitude and still short of the edge of the spreading water, went into a third.
He came back to flesh and set his feet on wet ground.
Above him and around him the water stood in a curved wall, lit from nowhere, with shapes drifting through it at the far side of the curve. The architecture matched what the Earth Demon had built in New York, and the exit condition would match too. Kill the owner and the room stops existing. The Earth Demon had been stupid enough to stand inside his own construction. This one would not be, and the walls held no body anywhere in them.
Ripples opened across the inner surface of the water.
Devils came through them one after another, and they came grinning, and they came for him.
END CHAPTER 63