Deception of the Damned

by P C Darkcliff

  DECEPTION OF THE DAMNED

  P.C. DARKCLIFF

  Copyright 2019 P.C. Darkcliff. All right reserved.

  Editor: Andrea Lundgren

  Cover artist: Andjela K

  To Rosa, my best friend and soulmate.

  To my family.

  Table of Contents

  Copyright Page

  PROLOGUE

  PART ONE | HROT

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  PART TWO | JASMIN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  PART THREE | THE DECEPTION

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  FROM THE AUTHOR

  THE PRIEST OF ORPAGUS IS COMING SOON!

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  PROLOGUE

  In the deep woods of the Czech Republic, sixty miles northeast of Prague, little Jasmin ascended the turret of a ruined castle. Although she was only four, she rushed up the steep spiral staircase so fast she beat her parents to the top by nearly ten seconds.

  “I can’t see, Daddy,” she said, pointing to a high arrow slit. Father lifted her so that she could peer outside at the masses of trees fighting for space among tall sandstone rocks.

  “This is called the Bohemian Paradise, Jasmin,” he said. “This is where your grandma grew up before she had me and took me to Alaska.”

  “Beautiful!” Jasmin exclaimed, her incredibly large, fern-green eyes glowing like the sunlit trees. She’d inherited those eyes from her grandmother, but she had Mother’s gentle, dark face, framed by an untamed mane of glossy black hair. “And Grandma lived here? In this castle?”

  Father chuckled and put her down. “No, treasure. She lived at Great-Grandpa’s, in the little cottage we’re staying at.”

  “But Great-Grandpa said Grandma was a queen,” Jasmin insisted.

  “I’m sure he didn’t say she was a queen, treasure,” Father said with a smile. “But there is a legend that your great-great-great-great . . . ” He kept repeating “great” over and over until Jasmin squealed with laughter. “ . . . great-grandmother was beautiful enough to catch the eye of a king called Rudolph. And guess what? The legend says that the two of them had a baby!”

  “And the baby was a princess?”

  Father scratched the back of his head. “It’s more complicated than that, treasure. They say the mother was something like a witch and—”

  “Witch?” Jasmin’s eyes flew wide open. “Witches are ugly!”

  “That’s enough stories for today,” Mother said with a somewhat alarmed smile. “Let’s go back to Great-Grandpa’s. We can have ice cream in town.”

  They descended to the bailey, where a few other tourists milled around the crumbling keep and palaces. Jasmin skipped a few steps ahead of her parents, hoping to find an ice cream stand right there.

  A large storm cloud floated over the curtain wall. It strangled the sunshine and cast the bailey into twilight. Jasmin gasped when she saw the man emerging from the shadows of a vault.

  The stranger halted on the vault’s top step and looked at her. He had long, tangled hair and a wild beard—just like the man she’d sometimes seen pushing a shopping cart in downtown Juneau—but his clothes were even filthier and more tattered.

  Jasmin froze. She’d always feared the man in Juneau, who often screamed and flailed his hands. Although he was calm, this man was even scarier—perhaps because she could see straight through him as if he were made of mist.

  When he noticed her staring, the man fell to his knees, his mouth open. “You can see me, little girl?” He spoke the same language as her great-grandpa. Although his tone was gentle, his voice was hoarse, as if he’d also been screaming.

  Jasmin started to shake. Tears of dread stood in her eyes, like dew on spring ferns. She blinked them away and looked at her parents. They had also halted, probably thinking she’d wanted to peek inside the vault. Father had taken the castle’s brochure out of his camera bag, and they were now reading it . . . as if nothing strange was happening.

  “Don’t be afraid of me,” the man pleaded. “I’m a friend. A friend! I’ve been waiting for so long for someone to see me! Please, don’t run from me. What’s your name? I’m Hrot. Don’t cry, please!”

  Jasmin burst into tears. A bee buzzed around her head. Normally, she might have yelped and hidden behind her father’s back, but now she didn’t even notice it. Numb with terror, she only trembled and cried.

  “What is it, treasure?” Mother bent over her. “Did the bee sting you?”

  She scanned Jasmin’s skin for a sting mark while her father swatted at the bee with the brochure. The stranger scrambled to his feet. He kept begging Jasmin not to be afraid, but that scared her even more. Why wouldn’t her parents see and hear the man who was right in front of them?

  “I found no sting anywhere,” Mother announced.

  “Maybe something spooked her,” said Father, who’d always been better at reading Jasmin’s eyes. “You know how strong her imagination is. She might think there’s a boogeyman down in the vault.”

  “Or your family witch,” Mother said with a mild reproof. “I think we should just go. It’s going to rain, anyway.”

  Father took Jasmin in his arms and turned toward the exit. Hrot howled in despair. Peeking over her father’s shoulder, Jasmin bawled harder when she saw him following them across the bailey.

  As he halted by the gate, Hrot began to weep as well. Through his tears, he watched them cross the stone bridge over the moat and disappear behind a clump of spruces. Jasmin would eventually forget she’d ever set foot in the Ruins, but Hrot would always remember her. He had been waiting for someone like her for four hundred years. It would be two more decades before they met again.

  PART ONE

  HROT

  CHAPTER ONE

  On the first day of his doom, Hrot stirred long before dawn, as if he couldn’t wait to plunge into the horrors that were awaiting him. Physically, he was ten years younger than he would be when he scared little Jasmin—and centuries less haunted.

  That morning, he didn’t wake up to the smoky stench of his hovel or to the snoring of his parents and siblings. Only a fresh breeze tickled his nose and whispered in his ears. Instead of a straw mattress poking at his back, he felt cold water rushing around his ankles.

  Hrot opened his eyes with a gasp as if not just his feet but also his head had been submerged. He stared dumbly at the wide river into whose shallows he’d waded.

  The light of the strong summer moon made the river look like a long, silvery tongue. The old willows that grew along the bank stretched their branches toward him as if they wanted to grab him by the hair. Their shadows fluttered wildly on the purring water. The grunting and squealing of wild boars rolled from the black woods.

  Hrot knew this place well, as the river constituted the northern boundary of his tribe’s hunting te
rritory. He could even make out the outline of the fisherman’s path that wound through the woods toward his village. But how did he get here? The last thing he remembered was falling asleep under the thatched roof of his home. He had never sleepwalked before in the twenty or so years of his life. It was all so confusing.

  The river ran deep and fierce midstream. Hrot shuddered when he realized he might have drowned if he’d waded in deeper. He scrambled out and walked along the grassy bank toward the path. His head buzzed, and nausea skulked up toward his throat. His skin stung and itched from mosquito bites. When he cut his big toe on a sharp stone, he realized he was barefoot.

  Clouds floated in and robbed the moon of its light. Hrot had hardly ever heard wild boars before. But now they seemed to have gone mad.

  A pair of eyes flared in the dark. Hrot staggered when he recalled the tales of ghouls and spirits that dwelled in the woods behind the river. Then the moon struggled out for a moment to show him that the eyes belonged to a person.

  Just before another cloud plunged the world into blackness, Hrot noticed the stranger had a slender figure and a pale, gentle face. Hrot would have taken it for a woman’s if it wasn’t for a neatly trimmed mustache framing the upper lip. The man looked nothing like the scruffy and filthy nomadic merchants. And nobody else had ever ventured into the territory of Hrot’s tribe.

  “Who are you?” Hrot called into the dark. “Did you get lost?”

  The stranger didn’t answer, but grass began to rustle under his feet. Those eyes were getting closer. They shone like the eyes of a nocturnal beast. Something in the recess of his mind shouted at Hrot to turn around and run. But the glowing pupils mesmerized him and made him step forward.

  A bolt of lightning kindled the sky and flashed a bright light on the stranger. The man was smiling benevolently under that mustache. But his shadow made Hrot scream in fright.

  It was only a moment, but Hrot knew he would never forget the horror he’d seen in the glare of the lightning: the slender figure had cast a massive shadow of an antlered monster with talons instead of hands and with tentacles growing from his back. The shadow had rolled over the river, making it bubble and steam. The night filled with the stench of rotting fish.

  “I’m the Emissary of the Otherworld,” the stranger said into the roar of thunder. “And I’ve brought something for you, Hrot.”

  But Hrot wasn’t in the mood for presents. He turned around and ran. Mud sucked on his feet like a giant leech. Branches tried to knock him over, and thorny undergrowth raked his skin and tunic. Staggering through the night like a blind drunkard, he left the path to his village far behind.

  The moon came out just as he slid on a large, slippery stone and fell face down into the grass. He turned around, half expecting the monster to leap at him and shred him with his claws. Fortunately, the Emissary was nowhere to be seen.

  The night suddenly plunged into silence: the wild boars were gone. A trout jumped out of the burbling water and plunged again. The breeze occasionally brought a slight howling of the wolves that roamed the sandstone labyrinth in the east. But where was the Emissary?

  HROT SPENT THE NIGHT shivering behind a large boulder. It was only at dawn that he dared venture back to the fisherman’s path.

  An eerie stench still lingered at the spot where the shadow had stained the river. Hrot felt safer when he scrambled up the hill and walked toward the pastures. He could already see the palisade that embraced the cluster of wattle and daub hovels of his village. However, his heart seemed to come loose and sink with every step he took; it always did when he headed for the gate.

  Although he’d spent every day of his life in the village, he’d always felt like an outcast. He was too different from the two hundred or so tribespeople to ever fit in. While his siblings only gawked as Mother made soup, Hrot’s head always burst with vague yet clever ideas for ways of putting steam to work; when the whole tribe cowered during thunderstorms, he dreamed of taming and controlling the energy that created the lightning bolts. He was an awkward, absent-minded dreamer with a wild shock of hair and a faraway look in his eyes—and everyone saw him as the village idiot. His mother was the only person who treated him kindly.

  Hrot would do anything to leave the village. Unfortunately, as he was too clumsy to kill and skin game, he would starve to death alone in the woods—unless the wolves, enemy tribes, or nomadic cutthroats got him first. The merchants always traveled in big groups for safety. And they never let him come along.

  Hrot sighed as he shambled out of the forest and entered the pastures. A few cows stared at him dumbly from a grove of oak trees. A flock of sheep bleated somewhere in the hills. White butterflies fluttered around the grass at his feet, and the buzzing of insects filled the warm air. A group of boys passed through the northern gate, carrying birch fishing rods. They gawked at him for a while, and then they turned around and rushed back, shouting, “He’s coming, he’s coming!”

  A sense of foreboding crept up Hrot’s spine.

  His mother scurried toward him on a pair of crooked legs. A little over forty, she was a shriveled old woman. Her gray hair hung in a greasy braid over her hunched back down to her waist. It swayed like a calf’s tail as she ran.

  “What have you done, my poor little boy?” she lamented as she gripped his hand and led him toward the palisade. “What have you done?”

  By then, Hrot’s nocturnal adventure began to take its toll. Claws of pain crushed his skull, and the strengthening sunshine seared through his eyes. The lack of sleep made his head spin. He felt as if he were sleepwalking again as he followed Mother through the gate and toward their hut, which stood behind the dirt square, tucked in between a forge and a pottery workshop.

  The villagers rushed at them from all sides like wasps at a pair of rotting plums: filthy children who clung to their pretty but rough and calloused mothers, and brutish men with waxed mustaches drooping over their long beards. Same as Hrot, most of them had light brown hair, fair eyes, and sunburnt skin. While the children were naked, the adults wore coarse linen tunics.

  Everyone laughed when they saw Lesana leading her son, who towered above her by at least two heads and outweighed her at least twice. It looked as if she were dragging along a stocky bull.

  Since he was little, Hrot had always tottered as if one of his legs were shorter than the other. Today, his strange, lurching limp was even more pronounced, which made the villagers laugh even more. The crowd got so thick that Lesana and Hrot had to halt in the middle of the dirt square.

  “Here you are!” somebody roared over the jeering and murmuring of the throng. Lesana’s older brother Jelen stomped toward them, his wrinkled face swollen with anger. His mean, round eyes bored into Hrot in wrath as he shouted, “Your poor mother has been looking all over for you! You snuck out of the village in the middle of the night like a thief. And you didn’t even close the gate, did you, maggot?”

  Too exhausted to respond, Hrot only hung his head.

  “You didn’t even close the gate,” Jelen repeated. This time, it wasn’t a question. “And you know what happened? Huh? All my mules escaped, all four of them, do you hear?”

  “Leave my little boy alone, you fiend!” Lesana snapped, and the whole village roared with laughter.

  “Leave him alone?” Jelen snarled. “He might as well have stolen those damned stupid mules. And stealing from your own clan is the worst of crimes!”

  “Is that so?” Hrot finally lifted his head to meet Uncle’s eyes. “What about the damned stupid hare you stole from us this past winter?”

  “I thought it was my damned stupid hare!”

  “But you took it from our hearth!”

  “I confused the hearths. It’s much better than confusing the woods with a mattress, dimwit.”

  Hrot was about to reply when Lesana uttered a high-pitched shriek. “Stop it, Jelen! Can’t you see how wretched he is? He needs to get some sleep.”

  “Sleep?” Jelen shouted. “He needs to get some sleep?
What was he doing at night, then? Everyone has already started working, and your little boy is going to bed? Look at him: while other young men are brawny from laboring in forges and logging sites, or wiry from chasing game through the woods, Hrot is pasty and paunchy from doing nothing. He’s so lazy he never even learned to walk properly.”

  “And his titties are bigger than his mother’s,” volunteered a young potter.

  “But his mustache is much smaller,” someone shouted from the ceremonial hearth, and everyone laughed again.

  “That’s right!” Jelen beamed with malicious happiness at the support he was getting. “And he doesn’t even have a beard like a man because he never acts like one!”

  People laughed some more when they saw Hrot unconsciously lifting his hand to his chin which was—back then—covered with scattered patches of fluffy light hair that made his lower face look like a dandelion seedhead.

  “But I do make myself useful!” Hrot shouted angrily. “It’s true that I am not a craftsman or a hunter, but I go trapping, and I spend whole days doing odd jobs. I don’t know what happened last night. I don’t even remember getting up and leaving the village. I must have been walking in my sleep, and when I woke up I was up to my ankles in the river. Can you even imagine the shock? Can you imagine the horrors lurking out there at night?”

  He shuddered at the recollection of the stranger and his monstrous shadow. A wave of fear swept over his tongue and made him mute.

  “If you sleepwalk, you must be possessed by an evil spirit,” Jelen said.

  “Oh, leave him alone, you beast!” Lesana retorted. “He could’ve drowned or been killed by wolves!”

  “And a good riddance it would have been!” Jelen boomed. “What if the next time he leaves the gate open, a horde of nomads gets in to finish us all off? He shouldn’t have come back, am I right?” He turned to the throng.

  “How can you speak like this, you monster?” Lesana snapped. “Don’t you remember you’re Hrot’s uncle?” She also looked around, hoping to see everyone as indignant as she was. But the crowd had obviously sided with Jelen.