It was then that I spake for the benefit of the cruel children, as well as myself. “Well, that’s not the way I remember my first fight with the future village idiot,” I said through bloody lips that quickly went dry. “I recall him lying on the ground bleeding with a rock beside his head, and I remember him running in the other direction every time he saw me coming from then on.” Thon Gjord’s head jerked and turned sideways; he listened, quickly stood, and faded into the ether. I got to my feet and shook my head to clear my senses.
Asenthine crouched in the corner of the igneous formation, growling like a wild animal. He tightly gripped Merklethenon’s legs as if the vampyric beast was all that remained grounding him to sanity. “No! No, I cannot stop them! They are slaughtering my whole family! No!” he screamed. Only the whites of his eyes shewed in his head. Light from the exit shined brightly.
I lifted my friend to his feet, and he relinquished his hold on Merklethenon. I embraced Asenthine, dragging him into an open sky lit by swirling colors—thick purples like velvet; a bright yellow one could almost taste… like some sort of citrus; greens more pronounced than the most verdant of pastures; and blood red weaving through those, and all the other pigments known to man, and some I had never known existed.
Asenthine fell to one knee. His eyes returning to their normal hue, he looked up at the sky. “Gnathongules?”
I nodded my head in agreement. “I think so.” I could hear the head of Xycanthia emanating its terrible hilarities all the way from my saddle bag where her casket was stored. I paid her no heed. My uneasiness brought on by my ordeal in the Tunnel of Sorrows was quickly abating as I breathed in the thin air on the Plain of Gnathongules. I could see it being drawn down from the swirling bright yellow veins in the sky, becoming golden as it permeated the atmosphere around us. It had a refreshing quality that was surely sustenance of a sort, as much as food and drink. A pink mist like swollen clouds spilled all about and rolled along the plain as far as the eye could see. It had a sweet, satisfying taste like the finest of pastries I had eaten in my youth.
I took from my saddlebag the casket containing our oracle and again held up the head of Xycanthia. She startled me by letting out a bark like a great dog, followed by her witchy cackling. It was then that Merklethenon, releasing a long groan that tapered to a pitiful whine, sped away. Asenthine started to give chase, fell to his knees, rose again, and went into a full run after his steed. But Merklethenon spread his massive wings and took to the sky, leaving Asenthine far below. The beast sped away in a northwesterly direction and was soon far out of sight.
I looked Xycanthia in her dead eyes and shouted, “You no-good piece of coffin-lining filth. You have frightened away Merklethenon with your barking and cackling. Infernal fool! Devil’s whore! May you kindle the flames eternally in Hell!”
“He he he! Slayer! It was your weirdling friend holding to that beast like a breast-feeding babe to his mother whilst in the grips of his own sorrows and insanity that made his mount fly into the ether, not my doings. I warned the two of you about touching the beasts while under the spell of the Tunnel of Sorrows.”
By then Asenthine had returned and heard most of the conversation. He looked at me—his black eyes full of pain—before turning away in shame.
“No matter,” the head of Xycanthia resumed. “It won’t be a long journey on foot. Look ahead; there are the Menhirs of Time.” Her head jerked and nodded as I held it aloft by a strand of hair.
In the distance, I could see the soft pink clouds of fog swirling about the base of a massive crystal monolith—a doorway through time itself. I focused my eyes and saw more of the giant crystal structures as the mist parted and gave way here and there. For the first time since we’d exited the Tunnel of Sorrows, I took Wrathmane by the reins and trudged forward on foot. Asenthine joined me in my trek to the gateways of Time that lay just ahead.
Chapter III: The Gates of Time
The menhirs jutted high into the sky farther than the eye could see and seemed to span several hundred feet of ground. They resembled mountains of transparent ice. Inside the structures ran striations of every color imaginable, like great intertwining veins. Some sort of energy surged and pulsed through the brightly connecting veins. The patterns changed shape and place like cracks of levin cutting through the sky.
“All right, Xycanthia, which one, and how do we enter? And if you try to trick me, just think about a snootful of Vampyre’s Bane for a while.”
Her severed head growled at me. “Hold, Slayer, and let me reach into Mimir’s well with the runes D’vartha carved into my head. The savage witch!”
Xycanthia closed her dead eyes for a time, and then she began humming. Of a sudden, her eyelids popped open and she choked out, “This one. Take this one.”
I took Wrathmane by the reins, still carrying Xycanthia’s head in my other hand like a bucket. I walked forward a few paces, Asenthine following. I halted in front of the monolith and asked of the oracle, “How?”
“Just walk into the damned thing. Go!” Xycanthia growled.
Wary of Xycanthia’s trickery—I had experienced it in the past when she was a whole woman, and not just a head—I looked at Asenthine. He nodded, reassuring me. We really did not have any choice at this point but to trust the devious oracle. I led Wrathmane into the base of the crystalline structure and felt myself ascending as I walked, although there was no effort of climbing.
The sky undulated with black clouds. Everything was dim, and fire leapt skyward at random intervals. Before us was a great pool of amorphous slime, sentient and endless. The thing belched forth life from its noxious vapors. Reptilian amoebae crawled up onto the small stretch of land that led to the beginning of all things that would be—the archetypes of life itself. Some of the things made their way onto the beach and ran, disappeared beyond the small tracks of land where fire jumped at random intervals. Some of them, more reptilian and well formed, took to the skies on crudely formed scaly wings, screaming horrible cries at being born through the eternally benighted welkin. There were others that barely made it to shore before they were dragged back into the pool to be reformed into only the gods of the pit know what. I looked behind me, but it was as if Wrathmane, Asenthine, and I had never passed through the door from the massive menhir that had let into this world. The headless thing without organs and limbs that had created life now surrounded us on all sides, save for small tracks of land here and there where fire leapt and licked the All-Night long before man had been the dream of the sea of madness that lay before us.
I held the severed head of Xycanthia before me at eye level, and it let out a high-pitched witchy cackle.
“Get us out of here now, you half-rotten head of a wicked crimson whore,” I roared.
“I obviously made an error in judgment,” Xycanthia rasped.
“It is not the first time,” I replied.
“Turn, Slayer.”
“Which way?” I replied.
“The way we came in,” the oracle said.
I spun in the direction opposite the yeasty sea that lay ahead of us. We were standing on a small strip of beach beyond which lay the abomination-spawning primal slime.
From Xycanthia’s severed head came the eerie sounds of forbidden runes. Anon, a door opened the fabric of Time. I saw Time ripple like heat escaping a flame. The benighted sky rumbled, and levin licked back and forth across the portal.
“Through the gateway, quickly,” Xycanthia croaked.
I mounted Wrathmane and held out my hand to Asenthine. The vampyre returned my grip, settling in behind me to ride pillion. My boots raked Wrathmane’s ribs, and the mighty steed leapt from the strip of land where fire exploded randomly on all sides. Wrathmane’s hooves touched solid earth, and we were again on the Plain of Gnathongules. The sky above pulsed with all the colors of the spectrum. I turned my horse around to see that the vile and chaotic sea that had vomited forth creation was replaced by the colossal structure wherein the genesis of all things was now co
ntained, one of many massive monoliths on the Plain of Gnathongules.
I held up the head of Xycanthia and shook it with anger. “Try again, crimson succubus! And this time, don’t lead us astray, or it will mean your end.”
“A mere setback, Slayer! I assure you I meant no deceit,” Xycanthia pleaded. “I am—after all—but a poor severed head working with tilted runes—and not a full set, at that, I might add.”
In a hushed voice, I consulted Asenthine, who now sat behind me.
He whispered in kind, “I fear we have no other options at this point, Karnov.” And after a brief conversation with the vampyre, I agreed not to dismount from my horse and burn Xycanthia’s head on the Plain of Gnathongules, although at that moment, I sorely wished to do it.
Here I was in a jam I would have never predicted: stuck in limbo between intervals of Time, with a vampyre riding on the back of my horse and taking directions from a treacherous severed head—returned from Hell—who could at any moment leave me stranded in the past, present, or future.
As far as Asenthine was concerned, I liked him and was beginning to trust the vampyre as much as one can trust another formed of flesh, for it had been my way in life to trust only steel when it came right down to it.
I held the head of Xycanthia in one hand and the reins to my mount in the other as we sauntered along the plain, passing and weaving through the many crystal menhirs that reached high into the kaleidoscopic sky. The pink fog rolled along the ground and covered the bases of the colossal structures. Xycanthia chaunted constantly, weaving the bind-runes that would unlock the mystery as to the whereabouts of D’vartha, mistress of the black arts.
Anon, the severed head danced in my hand excitedly and reverted back to speaking the language I know. “This one!” Xycanthia hissed. “Here is the doorway!” Again she chaunted in a language unintelligible to me and quickly vibrated a complex series of vowels and consonants.
“Quickly, Slayer! Herein lies the world where D’vartha now resides!”
Chapter IV: The Knight of Darkling Reich
With booted heels I prompted Wrathmane, and he leapt through the shimmering portal Xycanthia had opened with her gramarye. Into the great menhir we sped like a missile shot from a trebuchet. Anon, we were atop a mountain under a bleak autumn sky. I could almost taste the sweet alpine air as Wrathmane carried us down to the world below. For hours it seemed we wound through miles of narrow passages where basalt cliffs jutted out like charging knights, where one slip of my horse’s hooves could have led to a quick, plummeting death far below. Eventually, we reached level ground and traversed a great distance through dimly lit fungoid forests. There my nostrils were assailed by the familiar scent of rotting wood. The world we found ourselves in reminded me of many lands I had travelled in my own world and time.
“Karnov, halt!” Asenthine ejected. I reigned in my mount and listened. “Do you hear it?” he said.
I nodded. “I do now.” Screaming; horses whinnying; the clashing of steel on steel; the rustle of chain mail—all too familiar sounds. The stench of wound dew wafted forth on the wind. “Many men have died, and some are still dying!”
Slowly, I ambled Wrathmane forward along the path that exited the forest just ahead. In that clearing on the edge of the forest, one shiny, solid black figure battled many. All about the field were strewn corpses shorn of limbs. Shattered helmets lay beside bloody faces. Upturned beards showed beneath them slit throats where fresh blood still flowed. Bodies lay still, shot full of protruding arrows. Rent mail and shattered breast plates were in abundance. It was obvious that two armies had clashed and one had all died but for a single man. Of the force opposing the lone figure, only a handful now remained.
I unsheathed my sword. “Six against one!” I growled and charged into the fray. Asenthine followed, and Xycanthia’s head swung like a pendulum from my saddle, her horrible cachinnations filling the air.
Before I could reach the knight’s side, he slit one man’s throat with the point of his sword and clove another fighter from neck to breastbone with the return stroke. Spinning his sword backwards, he stabbed a stealthy attacker through the chest with an overhand thrust. He used his other hand like a hammer on the base of the pommel, and blood gushed from the man’s mouth onto his silver breast plate.
Asenthine and I were now on the remaining three. I slashed with grim delight, and the heads of the two remaining soldiers sailed through the air. Asenthine’s rapier pierced the third man’s heart quickly and withdrew. The knight’s assassin headed over onto the ground.
The last living man in the battle of two armies stood before us in silence and leaned on his great black broadsword. Drenched in blood though the blade was, I could see runes etched along the length of the glaive.
The figure was encased in some sort of black steel that looked more like polished obsidian than any metal I had known. His shiny black suit of armor was spackled from visor to metallic-shod heel in blood. And from the looks of his present state of health, most of it was not his own.
“Greetings, noble knight! You have fought long and valiantly,” I said as I gazed at the corpse-strewn battlefield. “It appears you are the lone survivor of the two clashing factions. Might I ask your name, and from where you hail?”
He stood there as still as an image of stone. Thinking that maybe he did not understand me, I started to rephrase my question when he interrupted me. Without raising the visor of his shiny black basinet, his voice rumbled sonorously. “One army!”
“One army?” I said
“One army. They all came against me. I leave a feast for the wheeling kites, and tonight their widows wail. What business is this of yours?”
“We seek the witch D’vartha. Maybe you know of her? She has long red hair and piercing green—”
The knight’s head jerked as if he were a dog being called by his master. He listened for something that neither I nor Asenthine could hear, perhaps a voice from beyond… I knew not what.
Suddenly the knight was upon me. I barely blocked his broadsword in time as he brought it down upon my glaive like a mighty butcher’s cleaver. Asenthine was by my side, his rapier whistling through empty air where the ebon-clad knight had just stood. I leapt to my nemesis and delivered a blow that should have shorn helmed head from shoulders, but the knight easily blocked my blade. For the brief interim that my steel contacted his, I dug my heels into the earth and pressed two-handed against his blade. With a shove that seemed effortless, he drove me to the earth, flat on my back.
Asenthine was behind him, thrusting his rapier. The knight spun, knocked the vampyre’s blade from his hand, and slashed a killing blow as he brought his broadsword around to split Asenthine’s head open. If it weren’t for his quick vampyric reflexes, Asenthine would have been destroyed. As it was, he still sustained a blow to the head and fell to the ground.
I was on my feet, sword in one hand, dagger in the other. I brought my glaive around. The knight leaned back to dodge the blow; when he did, I stepped in and thrust upward with the dagger. With the flat of his sword he knocked me to the ground, and his steel-shod foot came down upon my hand and broke the grip on my dagger. With a one-handed slash, he knocked my sword from my hand. As he raised his mighty broadsword above me two-handed and prepared for the quietus, I heard the rumble of horses’ hooves. He turned to face the charge coming over the verdant hill toward us. Again, I noticed him cock his head as if he were listening to something far away, something, it seemed, out of range of the battlefield.
I got to my feet, but before I could reach my sword, an armored white stallion came charging riderless into the clearing, and the black knight had sheathed his sword, leapt onto the charging mount, and ridden out of sight before the approaching horsemen could reach us. Asenthine meanwhile had regained his feet, but a gash dripped crimson across his forehead and ran in rivulets down into his strange eyes.
* * *
The Abbot Eothoclemes’ grey-bearded face was kind but solemn. He sat straight i
n the sturdy, high-backed chair opposite us, fumbling at his robes of emerald and nacarat. His brow was furrowed beneath his close-cropped white hair and low forehead. The wizened old monk looked every inch the philosopher.
“The two of you are lucky to be alive,” Eothoclemes said, nodding to Asenthine where he sat, somber of countenance.
The vampyre’s powers of regeneration had healed his head wound considerably, but there was a pucker in his forehead, and it jutted out slightly where the wound was still closing.
“I have never met such a formidable foe in battle,” I said.
The old man nodded in agreement.
“Who is this man that can vanquish a whole army by himself?” I asked.
“He is the Knight of Darkling Reich,” Eothoclemes answered.
“What is Darkling Reich?” I said.
“It is a shifting demesne of darkness and death,” the abbot said.
“Shifting?” I asked.
“Yes. When the knight first appeared, he slayed a number of Count Debrackle’s men. A band of hand-picked soldiers—Debrackle’s best—left here and followed him after he had kidnapped a woman staying at the castle. At the time, the knight’s dark demesne was seen on Allington Plain. It has since moved three times. It was last seen on the other end of Karava Forest a few miles from where Debrackle’s army had ridden upon you and your friend doing battle with the knight.”
“It wasn’t much of a battle, I’m afraid. Had the count’s men not ridden along when they did…”
Eothoclemes closed his eyes, understanding. “How did the two of you come upon the knight’s works of carnage?” he asked.
“It is a rather long story, but I will sum it up as succinctly as I can, and then if you would be so kind, I need to inquire of you regarding a matter that is very urgent, and the reason we came here to begin with.”
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