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

by Adam Golden

  Even in the midst of revelation of this new possible threat, Tulio was conscious of his amazement in his master’s endless confidence. He hadn’t said they’d keep coming until he died or they did. He made no allowances for the possibility of failure. He would take in the information available, he would plan, he would execute, and he would succeed. After all, Tulio thought, why shouldn’t he think that way? It had always gone exactly that way. Everything always worked out for Nicholas. That thought brought the loyal retainer up short.

  Bitterness? Where had that come from? He’d never wanted anything but success for Nicholas, he’d dedicated his life to seeing that the man got exactly what he wanted. Still, he couldn’t deny that in that moment he had felt bitter, almost disgusted at the notion of Nicholas’ success. It must be the heat, the adrenaline of the chase, his simmering anger at the monster’s tossing him about.

  Tulio pushed the strange feelings, and their consideration, aside as the robed and hooded monstrosity returned to them. Over one shoulder it carried a makeshift sack spattered with gore and apparently stuffed with limbs liberated from dead bandits. Tulio very pointedly did his best to avoid looking at either the monster or it’s horrible cargo.

  “Ah, Prancer!” Nicholas said clapping the creature on the shoulder jovially. “All finished?” The revenant said nothing, of course, and Nicholas went right on. “Good, good. Shall we go?”

  —

  Tulio stood in a patch of cool shade under a thick canopy of cypress leaves looking out over a wooded glade. Clear blue sky peaked through the tree cover, shafts of brilliant sun made pools of light in scores, and birds sang from the boughs of a dozen trees within his sight. Down below, just barely in range of his vision, a pair of young boys bounded and darted around trees and fallen logs, chasing each other and roughhousing as young boys everywhere do. The middle-aged manservant watched the spectacle with an easy smile of pure pleasure, completely at ease and quite pleased to be so. It felt like a great long time since he’d been at ease, though of course it wasn’t true. He loved his life, was fulfilled and happy. His honor was to serve. He sighed a long contented sigh and leaned back against the tree that shaded him, watching those far-off boys wrestle and remembering a simpler, more carefree time.

  In a blink the scene changed. Tulio remained in the same place, but the land around him swirled and shifted. The shadows grew longer, the light more pale and the woods more dense, more wild. Something about the scene pulled at the man’s memory, but he couldn’t place it. A high, exuberant burst of laughter broke through the myriad of early evening buzzings and chirpings that filled the woodland, and a pair of boys burst from a thick tangle of brush, running full out.

  “When I catch you . . .” one of them threatened.

  “As if you ever catch me!” the one in the lead shot back and forced a bit more speed out of his wiry adolescent legs as if to prove the point.

  Tulio straightened and a nebulous sort of alarm rose in his chest. Why? This felt . . . familiar. Why? The boys raced into a dense thicket of trees and a strangled scream boomed out of the copse before the scene shifted again.

  The thicket ended in a sheer ragged cliff overgrown with thick gnarled roots. The boys couldn’t have seen it coming at their headlong pace and they’d both raced clear over the edge. Now Tulio stood, looking down, as the two panicked, screaming youths clung desperately to the side. He was frozen with shock. There, dangling a hundred feet or more above the ground, were the terrified prepubescent faces of Nicholas and himself!

  “Nikki! Hang on! Just hold on as tight as you can. I’ll come to you!” Tulio’s younger self called.

  He was farther down the wall and a single hand held a bare spur of jagged rock. Nicholas, who was higher up, had managed to hook his arms around a thick and sturdy looking root and was screaming and flailing madly for aid. The young servant strained and struggled to get a second hand on the wall, and began the torturous effort to pull himself up the sharp uneven face. Just above him the wild thrashings of his young aristocratic friend had grown more frantic as the boy’s panic increased. More than once Tulio barely avoided getting a hard-swung boot in the face.

  “Nikki! Calm down! You’ve got a good hold, I’m coming. Just be calm!” the boy called with a calm command that made his older self swell with an odd sort of pride.

  The shade of Nicholas’ younger self seemed to take some heart from his friend. His wild spasms of panic settled down as he got back some of his composure.

  Young Tulio offered his friend encouragement and assurance as he pulled himself handhold by handhold up the wall. He kept his voice calm and assured; the older Tulio was reminded of a man calming a spooked horse.

  How unusual to see Nicholas so wild, so helpless and himself as the calm, confident, potent presence. The younger version of himself climbed high enough that he placed his shoulder beneath his young master’s foot and acted as a step, holding the smaller boy’s weight, allowing Nicholas to climb. Tulio could see the strain on his younger self, the bone weariness of the effort, but the boy never faltered for a second. Within moments Nicholas was sprawled, gasping at the top of the cliff and Tulio was heaving himself up over the lip.

  Shift.

  The Lady Fulvia brushed past young Tulio so quickly that he was nearly knocked sideways as she rushed to take charge of her son.

  “Oh, my boy, are you well?” she demanded. “How could you be so foolish? You could have been killed!” The lady was incensed, everything in her manner and bearing screamed of a scalded cat. The servants who’d been in attendance of the young lord would rue this day, that was sure.

  “You must be more careful! You are important. More important than anything! What would I do if you were to come to harm?” the woman asked, her voice heavy with unaccustomed emotion.

  The older Tulio was shocked to see the woman soften to the boy, even kneeling to take him in her arms in a rare show of motherly affection for her prized boy.

  The young Tulio stood off to the side, among the servants, smiling and looking pleased at the display between mother and son. His older counterpart was surprised to find that he was quivering with barely contained and unexplainable rage and hurt. He looked down, mystified, to find his fists clenched and wet with blood where his fingernails had bitten into his palms.

  “. . . more important than anything . . .”

  “. . . lio! Help!!”

  The strangled call pulled Tulio rudely from sleep and he sprang up from the tree he’d been resting against. The campsite where they’d stopped was a war zone. It was ringed with a wall of flames, and their gear and supplies were spread about and broken, as if by a tempest. Nicholas stood with his back against a large elm tree as the monster, Prancer blundered blindly about, tearing at a thick black cloth that was wrapped tight as a second skin around its head. The black robes had returned, and returned in force!

  Tulio’s heavy knife was out of its sheath and sailing through the space between him and the closest of the robed attackers before he’d fully formed the thought. The wide heavy blade spun two full rotations before it buried itself to the hilt in whatever chest was beneath the heavy robes. Tulio moved to retrieve it before the body had fully settled on the ground. He knew he wouldn’t have had a chance if the attackers weren’t completely focused on Nicholas, and he had to act fast if he was going to be of any help.

  He’d just wrestled his knife free of the dead man’s sternum when a jagged bolt of white light streaked out the night sky and slammed into the earth between Nicholas and the ring of advancing attackers.

  The robes reeled backward and Tulio’s world evaporated in a flash of blinding brilliance. He couldn’t see a thing but knew he’d been close to the next target. Just a step or two . . . Tulio’s hand struck something solid, but yielding, he closed his left hand around a bundle of coarse fabric and pulled back as hard as he could while his right arm swung around and drove his knife into the place he knew a man’s throat would be. The soft pop, wet thunk, and barely percept
ible rattling wheeze that followed told him he was correct. Two down, four to go.

  One of them turned as Tulio’s latest victim crumpled to the dirt. The gaze from the stygian depths of that black hood hit the bodyguard like a blow from a stunning hammer. His entire body went rigid as every one of his muscles seized and locked. He was frozen. Helpless. He saw a fireball rip through the air to his right and a brilliant flash of light spoke of something coming alight, though there was no accompanying scream.

  Tulio couldn’t tear his eyes from the figure advancing on him, a flourish of a voluminous black sleeve produced a wickedly pointed and sickle-curved dagger, and Tulio could nearly feel the predatory energy pouring off the killer beneath that robe.

  The howl that tore through the silence of this strange attack chilled the experienced fighter near as much as the knife-wielding churchman who was quickly closing the distance. Nicholas had called it. It had probably been a choice of desperation when he found himself alone and outnumbered in a dark wood. Tulio could understand that, but surely there had been something else he could have done.

  ‘Anything else.’

  The damned thing would even the odds, that was certain. What was uncertain was whether anyone, other than Nicholas, would be alive when it was finished. Tulio couldn’t turn his head so he didn’t see the first one to fall to the monster, but he heard it. The hard but yielding sound of something solid striking meat, the wet slosh of liquid spilled on dry leaves and dirt, and the unmistakable sound of a sloppy animal eating. Wet smacking sounds punctuated by low snarling, like a hungry dog finally released to feed after a long forced fast. Tulio shuddered, and happily, he wasn’t alone.

  The robed figure menacing him looked over his shoulder and started. The break in concentration was barely a moment, but as the robed hood turned back to Tulio, the obsessively trained and drilled servant rammed his broad knife into the dark hole of the hood and buried it where he thought the man’s eyes must be.

  He scanned the site for the monster, completely ignoring the spasm in the magician as he died on the end of his knife. Nothing. No monster. No remaining robes.

  Nicholas was freeing Prancer’s head with his belt knife. In a single moment the attack was over. A howl sounded in the distance. Nicholas’ demon was obviously on the trail of the fleeing attackers. Good.

  Tulio only hoped the damned thing went back to whatever godforsaken place it came from once it had finished them off.

  “Tulio!” Nicholas exclaimed, all but running toward his friend. “Are you well? Were you hurt? When you didn’t wake I worried that they’d . . .”

  Tulio lost the thread of Nicholas’ words as the dream slammed back into his memory. The anger he’d felt, the unthinking rage. What could it signify? Where had that scene come from? Those events hadn’t happened when he and Nicholas were boys. They’d spent long hours in the woods hunting and exploring, but there had never been a cliff, certainly no one had ever come so close to death. Yet in spite of those facts, the memory of the dream felt familiar, remembered.

  “Tulio?” Nicholas asked, concern etched in every line of his handsome, sincere face. “Are you well? Perhaps it was a spell after all?”

  “No, lord,” Tulio said quickly, and a little more sharply than he wanted to. “I am well, just shocked to come to in such a scene.” Nicholas cocked his head in the way he did when he meant to dig deeper. “Truly, dominus, I am quite well. We should move along. Your demon may not get them all, I’d rather not have them double back and find us sitting where they left us. Besides,” he said, spreading an arm to indicate the robed corpses that littered the site around them, “this location seems to have lost its picturesque charm.”

  Nicholas studied his oldest friend for another long moment with that eerily penetrating gaze of his, and then smiled and clapped Tulio on the shoulder. “Right you are. Onward then. Prancer! Come.”

  The silent revenant had used the time while Tulio slept to great effect it seemed. The creature’s heavy robe was gone, replaced by a pair of hide britches and a black tunic which appeared to be made from the tattered remains of a Zephyr’s cloak. The deep brown hood remained covering the creature’s ghastly head, neck and shoulders, it’s edges embellished with what appeared to be a leather thong strung with dozens of human teeth. Perched on the ghoul’s shoulder was a massive club which appeared to be fashioned of all the arm and leg bones it had collected earlier, now stripped of flesh, gleaming white, and bound tightly together with strips of some sort of sinew that Tulio fervently hoped was animal and decided not to consider too closely.

  He crossed himself, a reflexive action that he hadn’t indulged in years, and looked to Nicholas. “Your monster has taken to creative expression?” he asked.

  The Bishop gave a theatrical shutter, shrugged, and winked at his old friend.

  Tulio sighed, wiped his heavy knife clean on the robe of one of the dead, and fell in beside Nicholas as they started off once again

  A Little Learning

  Arius slid into the pitch-dark room and eased the heavy wooden door shut as quietly as possible. The room was on the lowest, darkest level of the warren of catacombs the Saulites called an abbey, but every noise sounded like the keening of bells, and Arius could not be careful enough. Even the sigh of relief the old man let out at achieving his sanctuary was muted, and immediately followed by a bitten curse as he stumbled into an obstruction in the dark and nearly toppled over.

  ‘Every damned time . . .’ the old man thought bitterly as he kicked at what he knew was a pile of dry dusty old manuscripts.

  The room was a good size, probably one of the largest he’d seen in the catacombs, but it was made claustrophobically small by the mountainous heaps of clutter that filled it. Shelves, racks, and pigeonholes stood crammed every which way and every one of them all but groaning under the weight of the books, scrolls, tablets, and sheets of papers that filled the room to bursting. Every surface was overfull. Codices lay in heaps on the floor, tablets in wood, stone, and more exotic materials stood stacked halfway to the ceiling, and scrolls littered the floor in such numbers that one couldn’t help but tread on them. When Arius had first seen the place, he’d been both astounded and outraged. How could anyone disrespect a library so? How could such a wealth of information be so neglected?

  An hour’s study had given him the answer. It was magic. It was a room stuffed with writings on herbology, alchemy, astrology, demonology, and all things mystical. Here was where the Saulite Brotherhood collected the knowledge it captured from those it hunted. It was knowledge they didn’t want and couldn’t esteem, but neither could they dismiss its value. So here it sat, moldering away, all but forgotten, and in such a state of benign neglect that they couldn’t possibly know what they actually had.

  The room full of strange texts might have been an albatross to the Brotherhood, but it was a godsend to their guest, who was growing ever more disenchanted with his hosts. The habits and traits that had been mildly disturbing, unsettling, or annoying on the road were amplified a hundred fold once they’d reached the abbey.

  Still, their eerie discipline went unrelaxed, and they paid Arius himself no mind or consideration whatsoever. He’d been dumped in a squalid little cell which reeked of decay, and had the distinct feeling of a crypt, and seemingly forgotten him. Questions went unanswered and demands roundly ignored. The day before, he’d ranted and raved in the corridor like a wild man, screaming at the top of his lungs just to break up the silence. The inexorable flow of unchanging black robes had washed around him like a river around a rock and taken as much notice as the river would have.

  He wasn’t mistreated by any means, food arrived twice a day outside his cell, and his waste bucket was replaced each morning. He was given all of the consideration of an unwanted, vaguely neglected pet, or a tolerated stray, and so in the tradition of strays everywhere, he took to wandering. His first exploration consisted of the same tedium and frustration he’d already had days of. One dark featureless corridor led to
another, one bare charmless cell after another, and periodically a robe would appear as though by magic before a door. Never giving any sign that it was a guard, but never moving aside either. The message was clear. They were not as oblivious to his presence as they pretended, and there were places he would simply not be permitted access. Arius began to wander farther and farther afield, and quickly found that the catacombs stretched much farther than he’d assumed. The abbey’s narrow black tunnels burrowed deep into the earth, and the far depths seemed utterly unpopulated.

  Arius’ explorations made it clear to him that the modern order was a shadow of what it had once been, and it was not merely a question of dwindling size. The upper regions, where the modern order dwelled, were comprised of twisting warrens of rough uneven passageways buttressed by moldering supports, more like the burrowing of rodents than the construction of men. The deep corridors, on the other hand, were wide, straight, carefully ordered hallways of dressed stone, not ornate by any stretch, but clearly well and carefully crafted.

  Here and there he even found faded and worn examples of relief carvings or the rotted remnants of a wall hanging, most exciting to him, however, were the cobweb encrusted torch brackets that hung at regular intervals, some still holding their precious charges in place. His light up until then had been limited to a pathetic little point of flame at the end of a taper he’d managed to filch from the Brotherhood’s morose chapel. It provided next to no illumination, and he lived in constant worry that it would puff out, leaving him alone and stranded in the absolute black deep under the earth. The first few torches he tried to liberate from the walls were so ancient and so long mummified that they crumbled to dust in his hands. It took what must have been the better part of an afternoon of dogged searching, but eventually, he managed to find two specimens that seemed as though they’d hold together. The rush of giddy excitement the old man felt as his taper’s pitiful flame brought the ancient torch alight, and the acrid stink of sulfur and lime that filled the air was both delightful and embarrassing. How far he’d fallen to be so overjoyed by such a mundane thing, yet here he was, he had light, direction, and a quest of sorts, once again. It wasn’t much, but it was something, and he so desperately needed something.