Through the Black Veil

by Steve Vera

  “Who said anything about walking? Tarsy, your turn to hang back. The rest of you, don’t even think about leaving these trees. Things might just get a little epic here. Understand?”

  He got an affirmation from Skip and Amanda, but surprise, surprise, nothing from Donovan. Gavin didn’t press it. If Donovan wanted to cross into the Krakenwood’s reach, then doom on him for being stupid. He turned to Cirena and Noah. “Ready?”

  They nodded.

  Old rituals bubbled to the top of his mind. The three of them took identical breaths, let them out and then blurred through the clearing so fast that they left sapphire echoes of themselves behind.

  Seconds later they stood unmolested on the other side of the clearing, faces flushed. Even Cirena could barely suppress her smile. “That wasn’t so b— Duck!”

  Years of conditioned reflexes sprang from his subconscious and even without his direction his cloak swirled around him in a cocoon of blue light. A microsecond later two dozen hand-sized thorns glanced off his cocoon in a firework of sparks. Noah’s and Cirena’s as well. This close they could see two eight-foot bushes bracketing the uneven door. Each bristled with hundreds of barbed thorns a foot long, glistening as if coated with poison. They swiveled toward the three of them as if they possessed some form of photosynthesis radar and unleashed another volley.

  “Keeper! Call off your guardians!” Gavin yelled. “We come in peace! We bear grave tidings!”

  “Uh, Stavengre, that was English,” Noah said.

  Duh. Gavin repeated in High Common while tracking their surroundings—firing thorn-bushes, the sudden cacophony of a hundred birds shrieking in unison and the black whirl of a pack of wolves from the hilltop.

  Cirena focused on the crooked door and the small hole in the center and pointed her finger, but before her eyes could roil in magic there was a rumbling beneath their feet, a great creaking of hundreds of boards like a wooden ship coming to rest on land. From behind them.

  Slowly they turned, each wearing an identical what-the-hell-could-that-be expression on their face. As one, they saw the ground beneath the Krakenwood tremble and writhe and with the sound of ripping roots, the tree lurched toward them like a land bound octopus.

  “That was not in the book,” Gavin yelled, stumbling backward in horrified amazement.

  “Watch the bushes,” Noah warned and on her cue another dozen mini-novas plinked off their cocoons, one right next to his ear.

  “Keeper!” This time in High Common. “Call off your guardians! We come with tidings from Valis!”

  Nothing. So be it.

  “Efil,” they said in a single voice, and three Quaranai burst to life simultaneously, filling the glen with pale light and a lonely wind that pierced through the cries of birds.

  Aptly named from both Greek and Vambracian mythology, the Krakenwood towered over them like a walking mountain and reached for them with a hundred tentacles.

  “Turn it into firewood,” Gavin said and then attacked.

  * * *

  Donovan watched the Shardyn fight with interest.

  Clearly they possessed control over the four basic elements—fire, earth, water and air—but they also appeared to be able to wield light itself. More than once he observed swarms of sizzling light-blades fly out from their fingers to impale this Krakenwood. In addition, the silver nimbuses surrounding their souls would flare with every use of magic.

  They were quicker, stronger and more resilient than any human being he’d ever come across, enhanced not through narcotics or steroids, but through magic itself, which seemed to flow through their bodies like water from a fountain. He saw streams of blue flames hiss from their palms like napalm consuming whole swaths of tentacles, noted their tactics of streaking (his word) under and through the dense curtains of branches while burying their blades deep into bark and wood. Blue flames would cling to the wounds of the tree, simmering as if coated in gasoline.

  They fought with the precision of a NASCAR pit crew.

  He turned to the others.

  Tarsidion might appear to be wholly glued to the scene, but Donovan felt a tendril of the man’s attention directed at Donovan himself. Watching.

  Skip had found the crook of a branch to rest his Barrett on, had his eye to the scope and was tracking the walking, screaming tree with his finger on the trigger guard, face bunched with intensity.

  Donovan then looked at Amanda. Her face was taut, her eyes overbright and in her nervousness, she chewed her bottom lip. For just a moment the resemblance between her and Donovan’s past was so poignant, so riveting that his lungs unplugged and his breathing stopped. A memory tore free from the dungeons of his mind and detonated behind his lids like angry phosphorous—the day of his murder. From its customary even baseline, his heart catapulted against his ribs, and his hearing became a high-pitched ring, higher even than the screaming of the tree.

  Tarsidion turned. The long-haired knight’s left green eye crinkled slightly in suspicious curiosity at Donovan. Perceptive fucker. Donovan removed his attention from Amanda and met the stare, calming his pulse and breathing even while Tarsidion probed. Donovan gave him nothing.

  “You guys all right?” Amanda asked questioningly from beside them, even as the crackle of fire clashed with the whisper of its slithering branches.

  “Just fine,” Tarsidion said, his hand resting easily on the hilt of his sword. Sparks popped from the outerbands of his emotions. “What about you, Donovan?” Tarsidion continued. “Are you all right?”

  “Just fine,” he said in a perfect imitation of Tarsidion’s own answer before dismissing them to watch a flaming branch fall from the Krakenwood with a thump, still writhing. “I’m always all right.”

  The fight raged on.

  * * *

  It wasn’t just that the Krakenwood was enormous, mobile and capable of sustaining damage that would have destroyed a tank...the thing could think.

  Gavin found this out the hard way. When the next volley of thorns hissed through the air behind him, instead of erecting a cocoon that was getting more and more difficult to maintain, Gavin went horizontal, let them pass harmlessly above him, landed in a somersault and sprung back up. Right into the many arms of the Krakenwood.

  It had set an ambush.

  A legion of ravenous tentacles descended from every direction like striking snakes, seizing his wrists, arms, legs and torso, even while he burned them to cinders with his hands and hacked them to ribbons. There were too many of them; his defenses were breached, his efforts overwhelmed.

  Like a fly in a web he was lifted ten feet off the ground, thrashing madly in its clutches. His armor strained as it was slowly crushed by limbs that could pulp a tractor.

  “Stavengre!” Cirena yelled somewhere from his right. Holy shit, that’s its mouth. The dark circle of wood that opened in the middle of its trunk was easily six feet across, revealing a maw filled with wooden teeth the size of a grown man’s arm, jagged and serrated like saws.

  If I die by some stupid tree in front of my fiancée, I swear...

  Just the thought of Donovan’s mocking, whispering laugh infused Gavin with a surge of adrenaline that emptied his Wellspring in a single torrent of magic, incinerating every tentacle clutching him as if he were a ball of lava. At the same instant a hail of blue-white darts sizzled into its bark from the side, compliments of Noah, and he dropped to the ground, rolled to his side, grabbed his blade and shot back up.

  Cirena met him there and together, back to back, they hacked through the Krakenwood’s counter-assault in a dance of weaving metal. Every time a tentacle fell to the ground it would writhe a few seconds, even encircle an ankle or boot, before wilting into stillness. But there was always another to take its place. Five more.

  It was like fighting infinity.

  “Cretins!” a voice bellowed from just
behind him. “Trespassers!” it came again in a tongue he hadn’t heard spoken in nearly two decades. Old Common. “What madness is this that you inflict upon my domain?”

  Gavin dared a glimpse over his shoulder and saw an old man with wild hair and a tall, warped staff bounding from a door that had been thrust open. The symbol atop his staff matched the ward they’d seen earlier in the forest—a crescent, a moon and three rays downward. It was blazing green light.

  “You dare defile this sacred land with your dark arts! Curse you! A thousand curses upon your house!”

  “We are Shardyn, Druid!” Gavin yelled. “Call off your guardians! We come in peace!” This time in Old Common. The old man froze.

  “Shardyn, you say?”

  The smell of burning vegetation and the sputter of flames crackled through the smoke-shrouded meadow. The keeper walked toward them and although he was old, he strode with the vitality of a much younger man. The Krakenwood lunged at Gavin again but this time, the old man held up a hand and instantly the tree halted and closed its mouth, though it trembled like a dog forced to balance a treat on its nose.

  “There have been no Shardyn in the world for more than a century,” the Druid said in a voice pregnant with suspicion. He came to a halt in front of a heavily panting Gavin and Cirena and appraised them with stormy eyes that went off in two directions. The left eye, however—his master eye if Gavin had to guess—bore into Gavin with a cunning that outshined his anger.

  “Perhaps on this side of the Ridge,” Gavin answered as calmly as he could through the heaving of his chest.

  Noah manifested on his other side, Quaranai ablaze but lowered.

  The Druid sniffed at her and then returned his attention to Gavin. “If what you say is true, cretin, prove your words. If it is truth, I shall grant you life and allow you passage through my sacred lands. But know this,” he said, holding up a surprisingly straight and tapered forefinger. “Soil my ears with lies or deceit and I shall burn the tongues out of your mouths before I feed you to my pets.”

  The Krakenwood creaked above them, even while bloody sap leaked from a hundred wounds. In the silence of the forest that had followed the Druid’s emergence, the crackle of fire licking its bark seemed exorbitantly loud.

  Gavin responded not with words but by warily raising his right hand, palm out, and whispering the first command he’d ever learned as a Shardyn Knight. Warm light pooled in the center of his palm and revealed the inscribed runes that marked all Knights of the Shard. They could not be duplicated.

  For a long moment the old man just stared, both eyes fixed on Gavin’s hand, his fuzzy, unbroken caterpillar of an eyebrow wriggling as he studied the gossamer glyphs. Noah and Cirena remained motionless. Statues coiled to strike.

  “Have I at last gone mad?” he finally whispered more to himself while he raised his hand to cover his mouth. His angry, turbulent eyes cleared, shining moistly in disbelief he didn’t even try to hide.

  “I assure you, good Druid, we are real,” Gavin said. “As are the tidings we bear.”

  It was these words that broke through his haze. His left eye sharpened. “What tidings do you speak of...Shardyn?”

  With an exhausted exhale that seemed to come from every part of his body, Gavin slowly dropped his hand and considered the words that he was duty-bound to speak, words that filled him with dread and shame—an acknowledgement of failure of his duty. Of dishonor. Words that would change the history of the world.

  “Asmodeous the Pale has returned.”

  His lips tasted like blood and ash.

  Chapter 16

  In Gavin’s humble opinion, Dwensolt the Druid was missing a couple of marbles.

  Not completely crazy, probably no more than any hermit was entitled, but there was something about those two separately roving eyes that Gavin found unsettling, the jerky, almost lizard-like movements of his head when he’d just stop, cock his ear to the silence and then answer with a mumble or whisper.

  “Where’s he taking us?” Skip asked in a low voice, unsuccessful at hiding his apprehension. They were inside the hill now, beyond the reach of the Krakenwood and thorn-firing bushes, walking down a hallway that smelled like incense, dirt and old food. Although it might have started off as a cave, the dwelling had been converted, tiled and decorated. Well, decorated was a bit generous as an adjective.

  “He didn’t say,” Gavin answered.

  Dwensolt turned his head slightly at Gavin’s response in English but continued, the click of his staff against the floor like the dripping of water. When Dwensolt had initially seen the strangely garbed police chief, college student and sociopath, his eyes had lit up with curiosity, which quickly fizzled as some dark thought settled in his head. Since then, he’d become more grave, distant even, and Gavin didn’t like that at all. He couldn’t explain it, but he felt like he was looking out over a chasm, some bottomless cliff that was pulling him forward, even though he wasn’t moving.

  The others felt it too. Noah’s customary mask of serenity had been replaced by something guarded and Tarsidion seemed to be looking everywhere at once. Even Cirena’s frost seemed brittle, and though she kept her head forward on the back of their host Druid, her eyes were constantly scanning. The only one who seemed unconcerned was Donovan. Somehow he always seemed as if he was exactly where he meant to be.

  The meeting between Dwensolt and Donovan had not begun very auspiciously. The Druid had stared long and hard at Donovan before allowing him access to his home and only because he was the guest of a Shardyn. A whole minute went by as the two had stared each other down, finally interrupted by Gavin’s gentle prodding. Still, and rightly so, the Druid’s distrust hung around him like oily armpits.

  They passed doorways sealed with braided grass curtains and crooked doors that hung unevenly, tapestries made of spider-silk and torches that whooshed to golden flames tinged with emerald, only to sputter after they’d passed. It seemed much larger in here than should have been possible.

  When they arrived at a double set of ivory doors banded in black wood trimming, Dwensolt flicked his fingers and they opened with a loud, staccato creak. The smell of old paper, fresh grass and sea foam greeted them upon their entry.

  “Gather around the fountain,” their host said and pointed to a pool of water inside a white marble basin. The water glimmered from sunlight streaming through a stained glass window on the other side of the chamber—green, gold and cherry. “Forgive me, but there are no chairs. I do not entertain...ever.”

  In front of the pool was a slender-necked book pedestal curving forward in fluted marble and on it...an official-looking tome marked with a green tassel. It was a thick thing, old leather and onion pages and for some reason, being in the same room with it made Gavin want to throw up. He turned to his brethren and saw that they were already staring at him, waiting for his direction. Why do you always think I have the answer?

  “You all right?” Amanda asked while sliding her fingers into his.

  Her touch broke through his tumult like an upraised hand that calls for silence in a thunderous auditorium. Even on the other side of reality, Amanda could read him. Sooth him with a single gesture.

  He kissed her on the lips. “Now I am.”

  “Go on, sit,” Dwensolt said. Only after the Shardyn acquiesced did the others as well, dropping to rumps and knees.

  Once they were seated, Dwensolt straightened his back and walked to the front of them, staff clicking, to the pedestal with veins of green and gold running through the stone. He released his staff (which continued to stand) and stared down at the book, at them and then back down. Gavin nibbled on his thumbnail.

  “I was not born on this side of the Ridge,” Dwensolt began. His uncombed, wild hair clashed with the somber tone of his voice. “And I have few possessions that survived the journey. This tome you see before you is one t
hat did. It is my most coveted possession.”

  Please be good news...

  “Within it is contained one of my favorite stories, a legend that has dimmed from all memories but those of sages and the learned—the legend of the Seven Apprentices and the Battle of Carnage Gate.”

  “Hey, Noah, how about a little translation?” Skip whispered.

  “In a moment,” she whispered back, eyes locked on Dwensolt. She gave the druid a quick nod to continue. Dwensolt began to read.

  “In the history of this world, never has there been a battle more grand and of such import than that of Carnage Gate—the last battle of the Great Drynnian War, where the lives of so many hung in the balance. Arrayed in the great vale north of the Eternal City, the hordes of the Underworld had marshaled, drenched in victory and bloodlust. All that had stood before them had fallen.”

  Oh my God, Gavin thought. This story is about us.

  “Standing to meet them was all that remained of the glory of the Sky Races. Divided, jealous and full of treachery, the splendors of the Sky Races had been laid waste by the fury of the Underworld. Only then, at this last-pitched battle, at the brink of a Dark Age that would never lift, Wizard at last stood beside Magi, Sorcerer abreast Druid, where the famed Nu’romian Legions stood in formation aside the mighty Knights of Vambrace, Elverai Nu’vram beside their hated kin the Du’vram, D’worves and Trolls and even the Goblinkind...all would be decided on this field.”

  “Sure wish I knew what was going on,” Skip mumbled.

  Dwensolt’s voice had taken on the tone of storyteller, and for just a glimpse, Gavin felt like a child in front of the Temple Librarian.

  “On that day, at the greatest of all battles, six young, newly ordained Shardyn Knights under the command of the Seneschal of the Shardyn Temple, undertook the most perilous of all quests...” Dwensolt dropped his voice further and fixed each of the assembled with his right eye. “To slay Asmodeous the Pale, Overlord of the Drynn, within his own camp.”