Doomwalker

by Kathryn Zurmehly

  Rich and blessed as the city was, it could not hold like this for long.

  “Can’t powers just appear where they want to?” Galian asked as they walked through the orchards outside the city.

  “Within limits,” Valen said, “They get…something like exhausted. Like I said, that’s part of what’s bothering me about this.”

  Paladin Galian had to be Valen’s age, or close, but he looked less traveled and seemed to bounce with excitement. Maryx thought of the demon they’d fought earlier, and wondered how his enthusiasm was going to handle that if they found anything today. “Powers are insane,” the man said with a shrug, “so maybe it’s just being insane.”

  Valen glanced at the shorter man. “You really needed to get out of the Temple more often.”

  Maryx made an inquisitive noise despite herself.

  “He’s managed to get guard duty at the shrine for years.”

  “Six,” Galian said cheerfully, “Spent four before that as an escort for traveling priestesses. So I have traveled, you barbarian.”

  “Sleeping in Temple wayhouses, crossing paths with fleeing bandit scouts at the most. You brushed up against a power once.”

  Galian shrugged and rested a hand on his sword, a twin for Valen’s weapon. His face grew grim. “Well, here I am, to learn proper Paladin violence from the master.”

  Well, she’d give him that much credit. He was going to need some skills on that front. “Doubtful we’ll find anything, anyway.”

  Valen sighed, vaulting the short fence that marked the edge of the farmland with masculine grace. Maryx opted to hop on top of the thing and hop back down so as to avoid jarring her shoulder. The cut was healing well enough, but the pain lingered. She expected Galian to tumble over the fence like fool, perhaps breaking the rickety old thing, but he vaulted over without an issue. She revised her idea of uselessness slightly.

  The air rang with the sound of axes hitting tree trunks. They hit the source of the sound a little ways into the forest, where the fence vanished from view. A tight-lipped Crownsguard sentry jumped as he saw them, then nodded to the Paladins. A pack of his fellows were hard at work chopping down trees and loading a wagon with timber.

  “Firewood,” Maryx murmured to Galian’s confused stare, “For the siege.”

  “Oh.”

  She gave him a smile without showing her teeth. “We may not find a demon, but perhaps we’ll an army.”

  He tightened his grip on his sword. “Well, either we find them or they find us, soon enough.” He called ahead to his friend. “Bandits, wolves, anything, Valen. I know the war won’t be like sparring at the Temple.”

  Valen stopped, half-turned, then kept going. The other Paladin shrugged to Maryx. “The world weighs on his mind today. Valen thinks too much.”

  “These days, he has cause to.”

  “Maybe. I’ve never seen it make anything easier, though.”

  Maryx nodded and caught up to Valen. “I spoke to one of my fellow scouts last night. He had a tale to tell. Well, most of one.”

  “This isn’t going to be good news, is it?”

  “Mortals have made deals with demons before,” she said, “For weapons.”

  “That’s impossible.”

  “Ryl was a scholar, once.” One deeper into secrets than she’d guessed, which explained his place as a scout. “He studied these things.”

  “Legends. Fireside ballads. I’ve hunted powers since I was fifteen, Maryx. Some do strange things, sometimes, but demons don’t do that. They just kill.”

  She debated internally on what to tell him for a moment. “One spared you.” He got a dark look on his face. “They had a purpose to it, according to Ryl’s studies, and…it is not a story that would be misremembered. Locked away, yes, but not warped.” Many things had been twisted, but not anything about the gods. “The demons asked them to kill the gods as payment.”

  Valen stopped. “Humans did that. To throw off elven chains.”

  She snorted. “Legends. Fireside ballads. I don’t think that bit of information comes from any Tribunal prophet or herald.”

  Dark eyes narrowed. He opened his mouth to say something, but Galian interrupted. “Valen! Would this be a track like you were talking about?”

  They rushed back to the other Paladin. He was pointing at a pair of the strange, dead prints of their quarry.

  Valen laughed quietly as he crouched over the prints. “And here I thought you’d be useless today.”

  Galian rolled his eyes. “How can we track with just one set of prints?”

  Maryx looked over Valen’s shoulder and spotted it in the shadows. “Another there.” She headed carefully over to a tree trunk a good hundred paces further into the woods. Whatever had made the mark could have been crouching on the tree. Another blackened mark, further up, could have been where its hand had hung onto the trunk. “Do powers jump about much, Valen?”

  “Godshards might, but they don’t wear boots.” He followed to look at the marks.

  “Accurate description. This tree is dying.” She kicked at its base. Wood fell off in spongy chunks as if it were rotting where it stood. She supposed it was. “If it is so agile, that might explain why we couldn’t track it before.”

  They followed the trail slowly deeper into the forest. Anything their quarry touched withered and died. There were many spots of barren stone and standing dead trees without any sign of a freshly blackened mark, but they seemed to match those on the trail they were following. An older path. It must have been making its way to and from the forest through the farmland, which was being stripped of anything near edible. It could have maneuvered so they couldn’t track it if it was careful.

  A shadow leapt from the treetops down onto Valen. The Paladin threw himself to the ground, coming back up with his sword unsheathed.

  Maryx and Galian drew their own weapons, but not sooner than three more shadowy figures burst from the forest.

  Maryx blocked the furious downswing of a short sword and noticed that the forest was normal, sunlit and alive, not shrouded in lifeless dimness. These weren’t demons, weren’t broken bits of gods. Reality had not warped around their sickness.

  The sword withdrew, held high by the human figure. His dark armor and weapons smoked like the demon on the Road. He twirled his weapons ridiculous and charged at Maryx again.

  The blows were wild, untrained…and strong and fast, stronger and faster than any human had a right to be. He whirled forward, dancing more than fighting, powerful blows angling for gaps in her defense. She blocked him, brushing him away just to have him come prancing obnoxiously back. Her shoulder slowed her, humming into a fresh new pain.

  The demon magic was probably making it worse. She was certain that if she carried any blade but this she would feel the shock of it through the steel.

  Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a barbaric looking monster of a man slamming Valen with a shield and a mace, all of him smoking. A third, armed with a short sword, kept trying to dart in. She heard Galian grunting, but she couldn’t afford to turn and see how the other Paladin was faring.

  Her enemy drove her back. She had to control each step, watch for branches and rocks that would send her tumbling and allow this dancing madman to gut her. The vegetation beneath his feet merely crumbled to dust, an unfair advantage.

  She threw back a strike and pressed forward, pushing the pain in her shoulder out of her mind. The madman giggled as he twisted far too fast away from a snapping slash.

  With an animalistic snarl, Maryx flicked her blade back, whipping it across his chest. The giggling halted and he sprung backwards to crouch on a tree trunk, the plant withering beneath him. His smoking helm cocked to the side, watching and waiting.

  She came up steadily to a guard, then threw her knife at him with her left hand, shoulder protesting with a scream.

  He barely dodged the weapon, scampering away into the forest. Maryx cursed but didn’t wait, bounding over to catch Valen’s sword-armed attacker in
the midsection as he lunged for the Paladin’s back.

  She felt the strange, smoky armor give strangely and slickly beneath her sword, but the man—no, woman, the armor revealed that much—didn’t collapse, just staggered back reeling. She spat a string of guttural curses at Maryx from behind her helm and limped backwards.

  Maryx pressed her steadily, unable to push too hard. The impact with the armor had sent a wave of pain rolling through her shoulder and leaving it nearly numb.

  Freed from the flanking attacks, Valen was driving his foe back with powerful ringing blows on his shield. Golden light flared from the Paladin’s sword with every strike.

  The woman shouted something in her rough language to the man, too fast for Maryx to catch, and crouched to spring away.

  “No!” Maryx yelled, charging, but her sword swung through empty air as the woman bolted absurdly fast into the woods. She turned to see Valen dodge a wild swing of the giant man’s shield. Right behind it came the powerful mace. Maryx felt the warning die in her throat as she realized it would crush Valen’s skull.

  But it seemed to rebound suddenly, impossibly. The lack of impact seemed to shake Valen, and before he could recover, the man fled, howling curses back through the woods until he vanished swiftly from sight.

  Both elf and Paladin turned in time to see Galian thrusting his sword into his enemy’s neck as the man lunged past him. It took far too long, and all of his weight, for it go through, but it did, the point erupting from the under man’s dark helm with a vicious hiss, golden light shimmering through the dark smoke.

  Galian stepped on the man’s back, wincing at the contact, and pulled his sword back out.

  The three stood in silence for a moment, weapons and senses ready. But no smoky, dark figures burst back through the woods.

  Valen lowered his blade first and touched the side of his head, where the mace should have smashed through his skull. Maryx caught his eye and nodded solemnly.

  The man, mortal as any of them, had wanted Valen dead. His weapon hadn’t.

  Galian was staring at the man he’d half-beheaded. Valen shook himself and walked over to clap his friend on the shoulder. “Well fought,” he said, wearily.

  “I didn’t…I didn’t want to kill him by stabbing him through the back.”

  “It was an opening that he gave to you. You’d have been a fool not take it.”

  “You lived, he died,” Maryx said, “If you want a fair fight, go spar. In battle, you win or you die. There are no rules.”

  The man suddenly coughed and rolled over, making all of them jump.

  Maryx knocked the smoking, demon-touched stave he’d been fighting with away from him. It started to smoke more and more, dwindling away to nothing. His armor was melting away the same way, and soon they could see his face, road-weathered and northerner pale.

  The icy blue eyes roved crazedly over them all and locked onto her. “Little elfy,” he said in a heavily accent, leering voice, “Little elfy. We’ll claim ye heartstone first, we will, and then we’ll go get the rest, and then we will call them here, and then it will be the age of suffering.” He laughed until he began to choke on it, whatever surge of power that had kept him alive finally gone.

  Then his body began to rot, too. They all drew back as it withered to nothing more than skeleton before their eyes.

  “Clean your sword,” Valen told Galian. The other Paladin snatched the corner of his bright cloak and cleaned the blood of his sword mechanically.

  To Maryx, he said, “You were right, about mortals working with demons.”

  “Unfortunately.” She sheathed her own unfortunately clean blade, as did Valen. “They want to summon demons with heartstones. Which the Temple…what, destroys?”

  “Keeps. They can’t be destroyed.”

  Galian finished cleaning his sword, leaving blood stained on his cloak, and sheathed the weapon. He blinked and came back into the waking world, staring at Maryx. “She’s an elf! Valen, she’s an elf!”

  She realized her hood had fallen back during the fight, confirming the demon-dealer’s ‘little elfy’. “Yes,” she said, “I am an elf.”

  Valen looked sheepish. “She is.”

  “How…why…how is an elf in the city?” He looked at the skeleton. “What was that? Who were those people? Those aren’t powers!” At least he hadn’t asked why Valen wasn’t dead, though she supposed he’d been too busy to see that.

  “I snuck her in.”

  “You!”

  “Ignorance of the law is no excuse, Paladin,” Maryx said with mild amusement. She felt the rush of battle flee her bones, leaving her exhausted with a numb left shoulder. “Unless you want to go haring off into the woods, where somewhere there is an encroaching hostile army, after those…demon warriors…I could use a drink.”

  He looked into the woods grimly, considering it. She waited, though Galian had turned quite firmly in what he probably assumed was the direction of Crownshold but definitely wasn’t. “They’ll just keep running until we’re too tired to fight them off,” Valen said after a moment, “I know where they want to go now. It isn’t easy for them to get there, and we need a plan to catch them.”

  “Then the Belarael it is.” Before it ran out of alcohol, with the refugees and war and all manner of impending doom…

  “No,” Galian said, “The Sunshield. Nothing demon-touched will go there.”

  “Too many drunk Paladins?” Valen asked with weary humor.

  “By Lyrica’s tiny toe, I swear that even the shrine is less blessed—formally, ceremonially blessed—than that tavern.”

  Maryx smiled slightly as she pulled her hood up and set them in the right direction. Let it not be said that the clerics of Lyrica didn’t value a good time.

  ✽✽✽

  Clerics of Lyrica might value a good time, but as it turned out they certainly had different conception of it.

  At least the ale was good. No wine, not a Lyrican thing, apparently, for whatever reason. Perhaps because it didn’t fit in with the blue and gold décor, perhaps. The music was older and, when they got there, some form of structured dancing was going on. Any energy in it was something that the participants added.

  Maryx watched as Galian went up to a well-dressed girl, who giggled and hid her face behind a fan. “I though Paladins were sworn to chastity.”

  “The actual rules are self-discipline and dedication to Lyrica above all else. Some think that means chastity. Most just think it means no relationships, not no relations.”

  Galian asked for the fair lady’s hand in a dance, prompting a giggle and a coy look. The girl was looked just shy of her majority, a wealthy young woman slumming it safely. “And your understanding is?”

  Valen may have blushed. The lighting made it hard to tell. “I’ve been too busy to give it much thought.” His voice grew grim. “Also, I’m apparently the damnation of the world, so I have other things on my mind.”

  The lightheartedness fell away, and Maryx turned to look at him. “A demon’s mercy, again, today.”

  “Why aren’t your oaths to slit my throat?”

  “You’ve been drinking too much. Or, rather, too little prior to tonight. No tolerance.”

  “Maryx.” No intonation, just her name.

  She considered the question. “I don’t really know, just have guesses.” He waited. “You would not know it now, but once our gods made mercy a great virtue. Their mercy. Kindness, maybe is the word, but it’s…a grander, deeper sort.” Her grandfather had told her that, speaking in the sideways way anyone did when skirting the Hierarch’s secrets. “It’s a terrible thing, to be doomed as you are. It would be worse yet to face it alone, I think.” For those who had stuck to this oath with the Immor, the demon-dealers, who slew the gods, it must have been a living hell.

  “What will it be?”

  “Elves have no prophecies, not like that. Stop moping in your beer, Valen. It doesn’t suit you and you know it.”

  He sat back and managed to look le
ss forlorn. “What would you suggest?”

  She gestured with her mug to where Galian was whispering sweet nothings to the girl with the fan. “You could go that route.”

  He frowned, which Maryx found gratifying because she was a fool a thousand times over, and drank from his mug without looking at her. “No.”

  “Take another page from Galian and stop thinking so much.”

  The comment won a small smile. “I’ve tried that. Not good at it.”

  “Then make your plans and plots and hope against hope the world will change.”

  “Is that what you do?”

  That struck hard, somehow, but she shrugged it off. “As you mentioned before, I’m a hedonist, at least by people’s standards.”

  “I know elven scouts can’t return to Aeldamarc under penalty of death. You’ve said before that the Hierarchs don’t really care before about what you do.”

  “Both true. I exist, as I said, a relative hedonist. Or I did.” She frowned down at her ale. “You and I, we need hobbies, Valen.”

  “Again, open to suggestions.”

  “Whittling is always popular. Even among elves, as it turns out.”

  He smiled warmly. “I’ll take it under consideration.”

  “As for myself…I’ve always enjoyed sleeping in.”

  He laughed at that.

  11

  “Does your head still hurt?”

  Valen didn’t dignify Galian’s question with a response. He was relieved, however, as they crossed into the dimness of Lyrica’s shrine. He hadn’t gotten drunk, but the ale at the Sunshield always left him with the wicked edge of a hangover anyway.

  “Since it doesn’t, maybe you’ll explain how it was you who smuggled an…erkh!” Galian tripped over Valen’s foot.

  “Watch your footing. And your mouth.”

  The shorter Paladin shook himself. “Yeah, fine, how, though?”

  “I didn’t know I was breaking the law.”

  “One of the oldest statutes in the city and you didn’t know. Those years of living on the road must be making you crack.”

  He shrugged, passing off discomfort as nonchalance, or trying to. There was nothing he could do about it anyway, Maryx said she’d been into the city before, and could enter again if she wanted. “She’s been here before.”