The Grimoire of Yule (The Shadows of Legend Book 1)

by Adam Golden

  Nicholas hit the ground with a series of snapping crunches and an impact that felt as if he’d fallen from a much higher height. The breath exploded from his lungs and left him gasping and writhing on his stomach. Everything hurt and he felt blood running in several places. Had he heard bones snapping? Where were they, whomever they might be? His mind felt fractured, his usually calm, iron focus skittering this way and that.

  “Stop!” he growled at himself disgustedly. “Breathe!” First, he had to get his body under control, he couldn’t face whatever was coming in a breathless heap. ‘My knife!’ His internal voice wailed ‘My power! I need it! I have to find it!’

  Nicholas pushed away the voice, the desperation he heard there sickened him. He was not that weak. He would not be! The knife was powerful, but it wasn’t as though he was helpless without it. A weakling couldn’t have leashed a creature as crafty, powerful, and malevolent as the Krampus in the first place. Whatever was in that murk would find him no easy meat.

  Nicholas slowly dragged a series of wheezing breaths through his battered lungs and tried to push himself up. Whatever littered the ground beneath him shifted and slid like stones or driftwood, making it difficult to get traction, but after more effort than it should have taken, Nicholas found his feet again.

  Nothing seemed broken, just battered, bruised, and bloody. Best to be gone. Nicholas took the first stride of the next leg of his blind run and froze. Standing two paces before him was a hooded figure baring a hazy, sputtering torch. One by one other lurid orange pricks of light winked to life like fireflies waking as twilight turned to dark. In a blink, a ring of figures in heavy shapeless robes surrounded him, their sickly, greasy light cutting a ring of clarity into the thick haze.

  The figure directly before Nicholas was unlike the others. It wore a hood over its head and shoulders like the rest, but was dressed in a fine set of britches, an elaborately embroidered coat of black silk, and finely made and polished leather boots turned at the knee. An enemy of means, and a powerful practitioner by the feel of him.

  Nicholas squared his shoulders, mentally rifling through the extensive catalog of incantations and hexes he’d collected over a decades-long career. He’d searched the world for followers of his art, but he’d never found one to match his own knowledge or innate power. If this one thought to overwhelm him with numbers, he’d be surprised.

  The rest of them were weak, unpracticed, likely acolytes. He’d make quick work of them. Nicholas martialed his internal resources, his fingers traced through the patterns of a Chaldean fire summons he’d learned as a boy. It was a crude thing, elementary, but mother had so loved fire, besides, it was powerful and had the advantage of working in all directions. The spell, fed by the flame of his will, built almost instantly to a peak, and a ring of white hot flame four feet tall exploded outward from Nicholas, washed through the ring of his enemies and vanished. Nothing! Not so much as a singed bit of wool. It was impossible.

  He flung out a hand and cried out in the arcane tongue of old Babylon. A bolt of lightning as thick as his torso ripped out of the unnatural gloom above, shattering the darkness for a split second as it lanced toward his enemies’ leader. The jagged spear of destruction crackled and popped with killing fury that charged the air around Nicholas, trying to lift the hair of his head and beard. It struck with all the fury of the Bishop’s rage and fear and, for a second, all was lost, the world was consumed in a brilliant white light. Nicholas’ heart leapt.

  Victory! Yellow halos danced before his vision as the brilliance faded. Nicholas rubbed at his abused eyes for a moment, blinked away tears that had sprung up, and skittered backward as his eyes took in the horrible truth.

  The ring of robes and their leader stood as unmolested as before. The one before him actually stood with his weight canted on one leg, hip thrust outward in a posture that screamed of impatience and boredom. With all the casual confidence of a man at his ease, the hooded leader reached behind his back and drew out a weapon, a long wickedly curved knife. Nicholas’ knife.

  The Bishop felt himself gaping in horror. How? The roar he’d heard in the darkness . . . it couldn’t be! No one else could command it.

  The hooded one moved forward, and Nicholas fled back, eyes locked onto that malevolent black spike. The knife dripped a constant trickle of thick blood from its downturned tip, in fact, the hand that held it was soaked in the stuff, as though it had been freshly plunged into a barrel of it.

  Nicholas couldn’t look away, couldn’t move back far enough. The ring of robed acolytes were closing in around him, choking off his escape.

  “Please . . .” the word was out before he even decided to speak. The voice that birthed it, not his usual confident baritone, but a breathy tremulous gasp. The unseen debris underfoot slid as he backpedaled, and Nicholas went down. His head struck something hard and he looked left and right in a dazed blurry panic. A shrill scream ripped from his lips as he came face to face with the glaring empty visage of a human skull, a very small skull. The clatter and crunch as he moved . . . The ground was littered in bones! The bones of children.

  The circle had closed around him now, and tears of horror, grief, and guilt poured down his cheeks. The robed figures no longer wore their hoods. A ring of accusing faces looked down at him. His mother Fulvia, the priest Arius, a poison merchant whose name he’d forgotten years before, Tulio, a rival for a rare Egyptian tome he’d had killed, Gaius something, and one he didn’t recall—a strange, dark skinned man, head shaved bald and marked with spidery black runes and glyphs like nothing Nicholas had ever seen. The bishop’s attention skittered to the hooded leader, stood menacingly at his feet, and brandished the bloody knife.

  “Who are you?” Nicholas roared, or tried to roar, it came out as more of a sniveling plea.

  The hooded man reached up, drew back his black hood, and a long wordless scream of hopeless dread rang through the dark as Nicholas beheld his own face looking back at him. The scream was drowned out by the laughing of his victims as his doppelganger sprang forward and drove the midnight polluted steel into Nicholas’ heart.

  —

  The Bishop burst back to consciousness, screaming and drenched in a bucket of cold terror sweat. Tulio was on his feet, knife half drawn and looking like a doused cat. One of Nicholas’ servant girls had dropped a goblet she was filling for Tulio and looked as though she might faint.

  “Dominus!” Tulio exclaimed as he slid his blade back into its sheath. “Thank the living Christ!”

  The abject relief on the man’s face was both pleasant and slightly disquieting, but it was also secondary in Nicholas’ thoughts. His hands went to his chest over his heart. Whole, no wound. Next it went to his waist. The knife . . . it wasn’t there!

  Tulio saw the movement, and pointed to the table next to the cot where he lay. Nicholas found the ebon curve of his knife carefully wrapped in a piece of white cloth.

  “I removed it,” the manservant explained. “I wouldn’t have touched it, but after the first day I thought you should be more comfortable.”

  The words moved through Nicholas’ mind like the slow flow of molasses. It took him a long moment to process them as he looked at the gleaming surface of the damned blade. When the import finally struck him, he looked up sharply at Tulio’s earnest, worried face.

  “The first day?” he exclaimed. “How long?”

  “You fell unconscious on deck six days after we boarded ship for Kios, that was four days ago, Excellency.”

  ‘Four days!’ Nicholas exclaimed internally. He’d been trapped in that nightmare for four days? His thoughts screeched to a halt as his eyes came to rest on an utterly still roved figure in the corner of the cabin. He hadn’t noticed the creature he thought of as Prancer standing there at first, now he couldn’t look away. The remembrance of that black blade plunging into his own heart flashed before his eyes and he dropped the thing on the coverlet before him.

  “I took his soul,” Nicholas rasped.

 
“Dominus!” Tulio warned in a sharp whisper as he gestured to the servant girl who’d gone back to filling the recovered goblet.

  “Tyra,” Tulio called, “will you see to fetching the master something to eat from the galley please. Bread, soup, and water, nothing too heavy, you understand?”

  The girl smiled, bobbed a curtsy, and raced off to see to her task. Tulio was up and checking on the security of the door before she was even completely out.

  “Now Dominus . . .” he started.

  “I took his soul,” Nicholas repeated in a dreary monotone. “Plunged this demon blasted thing,” he slapped the flat of the inky black blade with the back of his hand, “into his heart and wrenched his soul away. I used him like a puppet in that trial, Tulio. Look at him!”

  His servant didn’t turn, didn’t look away from his troubled master. “Tell me, Nikki, what happened?” the stalwart squat man asked.

  Nicholas took a long, ragged breath and recounted the entirety of the nightmare. When he’d finished, a long silence stretched as Tulio digested what he’d heard.

  “That is . . . horrifying,” he finally said. “Though, in honesty, your apparent guilt gives me hope for your soul, old friend.” Nicholas’ head came up sharply, his face questioning. “We have done dark work together, I worry that it becomes too easy for you,” Tulio told him. “Still, a day’s long sleep from which you could not be waked seems more than a simple fit of conscience. Could it be an attack? Some sorcery sent by whatever power you sensed in Myra?”

  Nicholas considered it. It was more than possible to influence a sleeping mind, to hold a dreamer in a dream, but the power required to hold someone as strong as himself . . . Nicholas shuddered. He would be sure to ward himself more strongly before sleeping in the future.

  He looked down at the knife lying atop the coverlet and felt a spasm of revulsion. He let out a slow breath and closed his fingers around the black-horn hilt. If he was under attack, he’d need all of his strength, regardless how dirty the surge of tingling power up his arm felt.

  “We’ll all need to be more vigilant,” Nicholas told his friend. The other man nodded and a moment later the girl, Tyra, returned with a covered tray and a bubbly smile. Despite claims that he wasn’t hungry, the Bishop ate every slurp of soup and crumb of two stale doughy loaves of bread, and then promptly fell back to sleep after webbing himself with thick layers of protective wards. As he drifted off, though, one thing troubled him. In the nightmare, when his victims’ faces had been revealed, why was Tulio among them?

  —

  After two days of rest and recovery, the Nicholas who strode down the gangplank into Kios harbor was the strong, commanding yet jovial presence his people were used to.

  He sat on the saddle of the horse Tulio had purchased for him easily, wore a kindly smile and even addressed a small group of Kios citizens who called out to him for a blessing. He felt himself again. There had been no more nightmares, and not a flicker of any sense of dark magic that he could find.

  When his small retinue were ready, he turned his mount toward the town’s main boulevard, with Tulio on his right and the Revenant Prancer on his left, and started the journey that would take him to the heart of both Imperial and Church politics. Time to put the specters to rest, he had a destiny to see to.

  —

  Outside the city, a single cloaked form stepped out from the obscuring shadows of Kios’ walls. Bright, zealous eyes watched as a small party of riders, packhorses, and walking servants started down the eastern road toward Nicaea.

  With a single boney hand covered in spidery lines of dark tattooed runes, the watcher drew down his hood. Beneath the heavy black drapery was a head shorn bald as an egg and stained dark by long years in the harsh sun. Covering every inch of flesh from his crown to his neck were clusters of runes, symbols, and occult glyphs that gave the strange character a menacing, alien aspect.

  The imposing figure muttered in a strange sibilant language not heard in the daylight for hundreds of years. The air around him hummed and pulsed for a moment and he spoke.

  “He comes, brothers, prepare.” With the last word, the strange energy dissipated, the tattooed figure raised his wide hood, stepped backward into the shadow of the wall, and vanished.

  Wars of Spirit

  Nicholas took a goblet of wine with a bright smile from the serving girl, Tyra, who graced him with a shy gaze and a smile that was more inviting than shy. Nicholas watched the pretty young servant sway out of the room appreciatively, took a long drink, and let out a pleased sigh as the fine red slid down his throat.

  “Wonderful, just wonderful!”

  The sitting room was as lavishly appointed and comfortably furnished as a guest suite in an imperial palace could be expected to be, and the sweet breeze off the lake that filtered through the massive balcony archway brought a delightful chill to the air. Beyond his physical pleasure, Nicholas was ecstatic about the course of the Council so far. His old friend, Arius, managed to be a bone of contention, even when he wasn’t in attendance, and it couldn’t have been working out better for Nicholas’ purposes.

  The old priest had quite a following in Alexandria and in several of the eastern churches. A full fifth of those assembled below would count themselves as ‘Arians’ of one stripe or another, and many more were on the fence regarding the old man’s theories. At least they were for now, by tomorrow many of those would be tripping over themselves to disavow both the theory and the man.

  Everything was forming nicely, it seemed as though Nicholas would be able to forge church doctrine, destroy a potentially dangerous enemy, and win the esteem and gratitude of Bishop Hosius himself!

  He picked up a sheaf of worn, often thumbed papers from where they lay beside him and grinned. The Thalia, a masterpiece of soon-to-be heretical theology, penned years before by Arius himself. To think that these innocent, if misguided scribblings, written by a man consumed by the need to hunt and destroy him, were the root of his impending success. It was too rich, too wonderful. How could he doubt that he was favored by destiny? To have the very man he needed thrust upon him by circumstance? Surely a sign of Grace. Of course, destiny could not be relied on to do all of the work. More than a decade of effort and planning had led to this turn of events.

  The death of the priest’s sister was an accident, a horrible crime which still haunted him. He hadn’t expected her. He’d panicked and tried to run. She tried to stop him. She cut him. He’d been so young, his control so new. It was the only time the demon ever came without being called. One second he was alone with the knife-wielding woman, the next it was there and she . . . Still, who could have guessed that one tragic event would shape so much of his life?

  It wasn’t until years later that he learned of the vengeance-mad priest hunting a red cloaked murderer across the Empire and set out to discover all he could. When he’d first discovered Arius’ writings, their potential hit him like a thunderbolt. The doctrine didn’t matter, it was heresy, but what made it perfect was that it was such a tame, unthreatening sort of heresy. The kind that could take hold if properly couched.

  Nicholas took another long sip of his excellent wine, and wondered what the old priest would think if he knew that Nicholas himself was a major reason why his theories had spread so widely in some circles. He’d had almost as much of a hand in building the Arian block represented in the council chamber as he had in forming its opposition. The various churches of Christ were a fractured lot, divided by doctrine, tradition, and simple human stubbornness. Unity required an enemy, a shared threat.

  Heresy.

  Unquestionably the single greatest dread of the faithful, those pernicious ideas spread by agents of evil to threaten the soul. What enemy could be more terrifying than an idea? Especially the wrong idea. He spread his seeds slowly over a period of years, carefully, and of course anonymously, nurturing their growth while he publicly became their most vocal opposition. Soon he began to build a small but influential following of likeminded pries
ts and bishops.

  Five years ago, he’d come to the attention of Bishop Hosius, the Imperial confessor himself, and easily the most powerful clergyman in the world. The good Bishop, it seemed, was a staunch opponent of the new doctrine spreading through the eastern churches.

  Nicholas still recalled the surreal feeling as he realized this paragon of the church was actually attempting to recruit him to help root out the very scourge he’d created. After that, he’d ramped up his clandestine efforts to spread the newly coined ‘Arianism’ while approaching his fellow bishops on Hosius’ behalf.

  The Bishop’s majority was healthy, but not quite the powerhouse he needed to be absolutely sure that his version of doctrine would win the day. The threat had to remain just strong enough to keep Nicholas and his small but influential following necessary. When the council finally voted, Nicholas meant for his faction’s votes to swing the issue in Hosius’ favor visibly and publicly, thus securing his position as a trusted and able ally, and opening corridors of power closed to all but the select few.

  Nicholas was lost in a daydream, and didn’t hear Tyra reenter the sitting room escorted by a young boy dressed as an imperial page. When the girl finally managed to insinuate herself upon her master’s consciousness he blinked and took a moment to take in the scene.

  “What is it?” he asked the boy.

  “A message, Excellency,” the boy said in a clear, strong voice, but with a bit of obvious nervousness. “From your man, Tulio? He says there’s a commotion in the council chamber and you should come, if you will.”

  Nicholas reached into his purse for a coin and handed it to the messenger without looking as he considered the implications. He never saw the stunned look on the boy’s face or the glint of gold in his quickly closed hand. The Bishop had already swept out the room and was halfway down the corridor by the time the suddenly wealthy page thought of making his escape.