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

by Adam Golden

  “Because I know you, Nicholas,” Tulio said softly. “Better than anyone I know your ambition and your drive. I knew you’d do anything to get back, and I know how important it is that you don’t. You can’t Nikki, you have to die.”

  “You see?” Fulvia gloated. “Your vaunted friend and his so-called loyalty unmasked!”

  “Be silent, witch!” Tulio roared. “Or will you tell him why you are suddenly so concerned with his welfare. Will you?”

  Nicholas looked back and forth between the two, utterly stupefied. Fulvia’s monstrous visage paled even further, her mouth worked wordlessly, and she shrank back on herself.

  Tulio closed the distance between them. Nicholas tried to turn away, but the powerful former manservant seized him by the shoulders and held him. “It’s free, Nikki,” he said shaking his old friend slightly. “The demon is free.”

  The words chilled Nicholas, but not nearly as much as the naked dread he saw in his stalwart friend’s face. The sadness, exhaustion, and shame were all there to see plainly, but now that he was looking closer, he could see the fear underpinning it all. Tulio was frightened to his soul. “It’s in you right now. My last sight in the living world was your monster wearing your face. It killed me with your hands,” the stout fighter told him. “We died on that damned black knife and loosed whatever bond that held it.” He shot a withering glare at Fulvia. “That’s why she wants you to return so desperately. Look at us more closely, Nicholas, our mother’s isn’t the only glamour you’re under.”

  Tulio spread his thick arms wide, inviting inspection, and Nicholas focused on his friend’s form. Like Fulvia had before, his brother seemed to shimmer, like the air above paving stones in the hot sun, but this time the glamour didn’t burst immediately. It resisted his effort to dispel it. That was troubling in and of itself. Fulvia was a strong witch. One of the strongest he’d ever encountered, and her spell had offered not the slightest resistance once he’d known to press it. This was strong magic, very strong. Nicholas focused his will and pressed harder on the barrier. It gave, but slowly, and not just Tulio but Fulvia, the gathered souls of the dead, and the entire area around them all began to ripple and shift.

  When the illusion finally shattered, Nicholas’ power snapped back at him violently and struck him like a sharp slap. It was nothing compared to the blow caused by the sight he saw. It was a slaughter yard. His brother’s bluff impassive face was flayed to the naked skull in places. His right arm ended at the elbow in a ragged mess of ripped flesh, as though the rest of the arm had been torn free with brute strength. His chest cavity and stomach stood open and spilled out coils of ropey entrails around his feet. Fulvia was rent by bloody claw marks across her emaciated torso and throat, thick runnels of dried blood coursed down the insides of her stick-like thighs, and savage looking bite marks covered parts of her that Nicholas couldn’t make himself consciously catalogue.

  Everywhere he looked he saw gruesome wounds and terrible mutilations, a parade of horrors to choke the devil himself laid itself out before his eyes. A carpet of torn limbs and shredded entrails littered the ground. The ashen rock was patterned with nauseating thick smears of viscera.

  Nicholas was too stunned to be sick, to horrified to be angry. How often had he seen the monster hunt? He’d thought he knew the height of the beast’s depravity. He’d been wrong. So wrong.

  “This is why she wants you gone. If you wake, it’ll take this butchery into the world, and she’ll be spared,” the tortured form of his beloved brother explained. He stepped forward, displaying the depth of the violations that had been done to him. “This is why I did what I did, Nikki. I had to stop that from happening. You must die! Right now it’s too weak to do anything in the real world, so it sates itself here, running riot in your soul, but if you add your strength to its . . .”

  The gruesome form that was his brother’s soul shuddered in horror and disgust.

  “You’re the strongest practitioner in centuries, you have the power to pull yourself back even from the grip of death, but if you do that you give that abomination we fed for so long that power. If you die, it dies. You want redemption, Nikki? This is how you get it. Deny this thing we nursed it’s prize. Please.”

  “It doesn’t have to be that way!” Fulvia shrieked as she hurled the ruin of her body at Nicholas’ feet, clinging to his ankles. “You’re strong,” she shot Tulio a baleful glare, “stronger than any practitioner in centuries. You can fight it! Kill it!” Her muddy green eyes were so crazed, so wild with mad, desperate hope that it actually stirred pity for the terrible old murderess.

  “Nicholas . . .” Tulio’s voice came warningly.

  “And what of your other monster?” Fulvia exclaimed in a desperate rush.

  Tulio winced.

  “What is she talking about?” Nicholas asked, confused. What other monster? His brother’s gaze went to his feet and he fidgeted.

  “Tulio?” Nicholas prompted.

  “Arius,” the other man said after a long pause. The name came out as though dragged by force. “He’s done something to himself, changed somehow. It was Arius that caused the devastation we saw at Byzantium . . . or Arius is a part of that thing now. Maelstrom.” Tulio said the word strangely, there was disgust, fear, confusion, and anger, but also a sort of wistful awed reverence all jumbled together in that word.

  “It’s an agent of Chaos,” Fulvia said impatiently. “Primordial power, older than light, older than magic. A thing from before creation. It broke your precious friend there with a twitch of its finger. Sent him slavering after you like a hunting hound. Haven’t you felt it?”

  Nicholas just stared at her, not sure what she meant, and the savaged old crone threw up her arms in frustration.

  “Of course, you haven’t!” she exclaimed. “Why should you notice, you don’t have to consider your power so long as it’s there! Why have a care for how it works so long as it does?”

  Her voice was heavy with bitter recrimination and envy, and Nicholas had to admit, she wasn’t wrong. He rarely considered his gift in the way she meant. It had always been there, a deep well for him to draw on at will. He rarely stopped to consider what fed the well.

  “Focus. Feel it,” the witch urged.

  Nicholas opened himself to the sensation of his power and gasped. Before, his power had felt like a fast-moving river. Dangerous to the unwary, treacherous in its way, but manageable if you knew what you were doing, and infinitely malleable to the careful hand. What he felt know was a riotous confusion of crashing waves and swirling eddies. The pure cleanliness that had always been there was gone, replaced by a thick, sucking mire of greasy sludge that tried to pull him down as it battered against itself, driven to frenzy by some unseen tidal force.

  Nicholas frantically tried to push the sense away but couldn’t. Panic welled inside him as something alien pressed itself toward his mind. It was wild, confused, fractious, and it knew him. Nicholas flailed and kicked, seeking some unsullied part of his power that he could throw against the strange sense that he instinctively knew was Maelstrom. It was beneath the corrupting filth, but trying to reach it was like trying to sift oil from water with his fingers. The Maelstrom sense pushed harder at the barrier between itself and his mind, and Nicholas threw himself wildly away from it. He needed something, anything . . .

  As if in answer, a pinprick of brilliant blue white light shimmered into being in the corner of his eye. He turned toward it desperately. What? He blinked and recoiled from the horror of his tortured brother and mother’s grotesque soul forms.

  “That . . .” he started, but he had no words.

  “It’s destroying magic, Nicholas,” Fulvia said bluntly. “You made it, and if you don’t stop it, it’ll unravel existence. Remember your lessons. What we call “magic” is no more or less than the ordering force of existence, the sinew that binds the body of reality together. This Maelstrom creature is the avatar of that force’s opposite. If it isn’t stopped, it will unmake the world, all wo
rlds, and it will be your fault. That will be your legacy.”

  “There was something else, a white light, small . . . barely there at all,” Nicholas said in a rushed gasp, he still felt as though he couldn’t catch his breath.

  “What?” Fulvia said, startled. “What do you . . . I’ve never. It couldn’t . . .” She was stammering.

  “What is it?” Nicholas asked.

  “I don’t . . . it’s impossible, but . . . it could be that you saw some spark of the First Force.”

  She paused as though awaiting some reaction and sighed when none came. “Such strength, wasted,” she started and then went on in a long, suffering, lectured tone. “Before Chaos and Order, before God, magic, or creation, the First Force was the source of it all. Or so the oldest lore says. Unfortunately, that is nearly all the lore says. Practitioners have sought it and speculated about its nature since the beginning. Most believe it is the source of magic, the ocean that feeds the lake, but no one really knows. None have ever held it, few have ever even sensed it. If you have found a spark of the First Force, there might be some hope.”

  Those last words came out with a sort of breathy, lustful hunger that brought Nicholas back to mindfulness of the covetous power-hungry creature he was speaking to. His distaste must have shown for the old witch sneered mockingly at him and pulled her tattered rags about herself arrogantly.

  “You have to go,” she said. “There isn’t another with your strength or knowledge in the world.” That last admission was obviously a bitter pill to the proud witch.

  “You cannot!” Tulio roared. “Nikki, the demon.”

  “I did this,” Nicholas said, waving a hand at the horror around him. “All of this. I have to make it right. I won’t allow the demon to do this to the world.”

  Tulio sagged with relief.

  “But Maelstrom must be stopped,” Nicholas continued. “I have to kill the demon.”

  “No!” Tulio groaned. “You can’t. You’ll fail and it will have you! Please . . .”

  “I have to try. I’m sorry,” Nicholas said regretfully. He squeezed his brother’s shoulder and turned to Fulvia. “Take me to my monster.”

  Call of Blood

  The Pack surged, blood drunk. The writhing mass of snapping jaws, rending claws, and straining muscle stretched beyond sight in every direction. The scent of fresh spilled blood and exposed viscera hung in the air. Glorious! A thousand snarling, snapping howls of challenge filled the stygian gloom, shaking the jagged onyx cliffs that stabbed at the pale-red sky all around.

  The music of rampage filled the dark emptiness and surged through the blood of the one who stood above the others. It threw back its head and howled a long guttural roar of ecstasy. Other cries answered the alpha as it hurled the broken corpse of its rival from the jagged promontory back to the clamor below. A hole opened where the wreckage of dead meat crushed the slow or unobservant, and was filled again as the strong closed in and claimed the meat of the weak.

  Strength was life. That was pack law, bred into blood and bone. The weak were unworthy of their meat, unworthy of life. The weak were not pack. The weak were meat. The pack was strength. Only the strongest reached the cliffs, and only the most savage of those could hope to ascend.

  The Alpha sucked the last hint of entrails from its barbed, ebon claw and licked its chops delightedly as it surveyed the churning frenzy. Untold thousands of its kind swarmed across the rocky surface below, struggling for the right to try themselves against those who clamored across the rocky cliff faces below the peaks. Few could best the gauntlet of their peers, navigate the razor-sharp rock faces, and withstand the violent, blood-freezing winds which would pull even the strongest males from a careless hold. Fewer still could stand before an alpha.

  In all the seething multitudes of the pack, only the barest handful lived long enough or fought well enough to climb out the mob and become beta. A bare shadow of those had the cunning or viciousness to claim the heights. The one who glared down at them now had occupied his peak for longer than any other in Pack memory. It was the only survivor left of its generation. Few dared meet its brilliant crimson gaze, and those who did were meat. No female dared deny it, it’s brood was legion. It’s coat of thick black hair was streaked with swaths of wiry grey and covered ropes of heavy muscle from thick neck to sharply cloven hooves. Where its leathery hide showed through it was a patchwork of gnarled scar tissue earned in hundreds or thousands of battles fought and won.

  The pack had no concept of things like honor or respect, it knew no fear, but pride ruled pack life, and strength was worshipped above all else. This alpha’s scars marked it out as one to defer to or flee from. They swelled it with pride. Save for one. On the left side of the stiff-crested mane atop its head, a heavy gloss-black horn curled backward, instead of resting against its ridged shoulder blade; as its other did, it ended in a ragged break, a little more than a hand’s width shorter than the other. It stood as a constant reminder of the single blot on the Alpha’s pride. It’s one failure, its single defeat.

  The memory ripped at the Alpha like claws of fire. Beaten by meat—strong meat. Everything about it was impossible by Pack law. The beaten were meat, meat did not live. Yet the Alpha was beaten, and it lived. It was strong. All that was not Pack was meat. The one that had beaten it was not pack. It was meat. Meat that had beaten pack. Strong meat. Impossible, maddening, but true.

  The Alpha traced a long sharp claw along it’s broken horn, and snarled. Trickery. Deceit. That was how it had been bested. Magic. It had taken the word from the strong meat. Magic, the strength that muscle, claw and tooth could not blood. The strength that had leashed it. The strong meat used its magic to breach the rift. It had torn open the great black wound in the body of the blood sky. That wound was the reason why Alphas ruled the heights, and why all others sought them. Only from the heights could the rift be reached, and only the rift offered the possibility of escape, of fresh hunts and blood of a richness beyond imagining.

  Pack blood was strong but stale, pack meat nourished but was tough and bitter. Beyond the rift was an eternity of savory sweet blood and juicy succulent meat. The Alpha felt a stirring in its barbed loins as it recalled the ecstasy of the greatest taste of all. Beyond sweet blood or fine meat, beyond the joy of battering the strongest female to the stone and stabbing itself inside, the creatures of the other had a delicacy like nothing else in pack life. The other had fear. It was another word that the Alpha had taken from the strong meat. Fear. It sang in his ears. The taste of fear was better than battle, better than blood or meat or sex. Only the feeling of its own strength compared, and fear made it stronger, gave it power beyond what blood or meat could.

  Before the strong meat’s magic, before it learned that the strength of the Alpha could fuel its power, breaches in the rift had been few and far between. They came only during the longest dark, the time the meat called “Solstice”. Whatever Alpha was able to fight its way into the wound, managed a short hunt, taking what strength they could before they were cast back with the return of the blood sky. None had ever been twice, and none had ever stayed longer, none before the Strong Meat’s trickery.

  The Alpha’s greatest shame had become its greatest strength. The rift was breached often now, always the Strong Meat called it, no other, and the Strong Meat’s power held it in The Other regardless of the blood sky. Dozens of trips to The Other, so much sweet blood and rich meat, and so much Fear, had changed the Alpha. No Alpha had ever gained as much strength or stayed strong as long as it had. It was . . . more than other Alphas, more than other Pack. It was Strongest.

  As though in answer to that conviction, a loud howl rumbled through the void, and a massive brute of a Beta leapt from the lower faces, shot into the Blood Sky, and slammed down onto the peak of the Alpha’s cliff, pounding a crater into the adamantine rock.

  The Beta sent it scent with a preening snarl. The impression of claws rending stone filled the Alpha’s mind. Mountain Killer. The Alpha smirked, rakin
g its rough file-like tongue over already dagger-sharp canines, an arrogant pup. It would not throw this one back to the mob below. It would harvest this one’s meat. The Alpha sent no scent. It was the Strongest, all Pack knew who sat atop the highest peak. Instead, it bombarded the young brute with the scents of the Betas who had come before it. A flood of impressions of confident, arrogant young bulls slammed into the Beta’s consciousness. Each had been strongest of their brood, every one bursting with pride and sure of strength. All meat. The mental assault kept on, the scents of the fallen surging and milling like the mob below.

  The burly Beta’s eyes grew startled at first, and then the Alpha saw startlement turn to alarm, and it snarled its pleasure as the meat bared down as if under a physical pressure. It was meat, another scent to be collected and hurled at the next meat to challenge . . .

  The Alpha’s head came up sharply, all thought of the cringing Beta forgotten as it struck him. The scent that was not a scent reached it. That rich, vibrant flavor, that tang of vitality, could only come from one place. It was The Other. The hair-lifting, crackling wrongness of a breech buzzed around the Alpha, and yet, something was wrong. It felt no pull, always before it had felt the tugging of summons like claws in its skin dragging it toward the hunt.

  Strongest hit the broken ground hard and felt the stone bite into its armor-hard hide with a hunger. Blood flowed freely from the set of long blood scores that had just missed the Alpha’s throat and had laid open it’s chest instead. The Beta’s attack was savage, and well-executed. It had capitalized on the Alpha’s shock, on its loss of concentration. A snarl of challenge rose in Strongest’s throat and its blood surged.

  Battle.

  In the space between breaths, it leapt for the young brute’s throat with claws and teeth bared. It felt the weaker creature’s throat in its jaws already. The Beta was strong, but it was Strongest. A chorus of howls ripped through the flat stale air of the heights as the Alpha clasped with its prey and tore the older creature’s concentration from the sweetness of the kill. The Alphas, the lesser Alphas, converged. They felt it. They hunted. They tracked game that belonged to it alone.