In the Shadow of the Rook (The Sons Incarnate Book 1)

by JDL Rosell

  Erik heard the hush of the nautded creatures outside, louder than when they’d banged at the door, and swallowed. “I didn’t want to do this,” he whispered, soft enough not to be heard. He held up his hand and noticed it shook, but there was nothing for it. As he came closer, the hermit’s great arms flailed out, pushing against Erik and knocking him back. Get it over with, the devilish voice goaded him.

  Shoving back one of the lashing arms for an opening, Erik stabbed into the hermit’s bloated neck. The skin barely resisted, and almost luminescent liquid spurted up. The hermit spat and gargled, and hit at him, but it didn’t have any force behind it.

  Erik grit his teeth and cut across.

  A horrible gurgle came as blood filled the throat, and the great shadowed figure continued flailing its large arms at him, but he barely felt it. Its blood welled out of the cut left behind, shimmering as it spilled on the skin.

  There was a final gasp, one last twitch of the arms, like a fish when cut into its spine. The howling dead went silent, and all Erik heard was the slow drip of blood.

  Five

  Erik escaped Zauhn by the river, by design the one easy access point in and out of the town. It was simpler to funnel the lurchers in so you knew where to fight them, and it saved on maintenance of the primary gates. If a few folk too poor to move from the riverbanks died every year, it was no sweat off the count's back.

  Between the dash from Zauhn’s ever-watchful guards and the hard swim in the fast-flowing river, Erik lost his bag of possessions, and was left with nothing but the clothes on his back, the coins in his purse, the knife on his belt. But he had greater concerns than that.

  His father hadn't given him much in their final parting, but he had given him one last gift: a purpose, and a name. Though he didn't know where to search, Erik would pursue this man or woman wherever they were, to hunt down the secret his father claimed they knew. He would find the Rook, and hope his father hadn't deceived him. Again.

  But there was only so much time. Only so long before the elixir ran out. Only so long before his body began to rot from the inside out, leaving him no more than another shambling lurcher, less in control of his fate than a dying man. At least a dying man could escape.

  Erik rose from the river, and started to run.

  Erik breathed in raggedly and withdrew his hand, fighting to keep his thoughts away from the still form before him. Instead, he concentrated on the pregnant silence that had fallen over the forest. Were the nautded animals released as their master died? Or did they now wait in ambush?

  Something brushed his ankle and he nearly jumped out of his skin, kicking down instinctively. But it was just the lurcher from before, still trying to detain him, even with no limbs, no eyes, and its brain beyond mush. Because of me, Erik thought, trying to keep down the sickness suddenly rising up.

  He breathed out, stepped over it without looking, and went to the chest in the bare room. Pillaging a man’s possessions—much safer moral territory, the incessant voice in his head said. Ignoring it, Erik picked through its contents and found equipment similar to what was in his father’s laboratory. But one in particular stuck out to him: a rounded glass chamber with a leather tube extending from its bottom, and a needle coming off the end with a small pump. A surinx—an implement to inject liquid into a man’s veins. He intended to use it to keep hydrated, but it had had another purpose during his childhood, when his father administered the elixir to him—to ‘keep him healthy,’ he’d always said. But there was no use dredging up old, sour memories. Erik took the surinx and rose.

  Outside, the sounds of the nautded creatures grew quieter, more distant, then finally stopped altogether. With barely a backward glance, Erik moved to the door, clutching his bloody knife in one hand and the surinx in the other, and with barely reined in dread, he slowly opened it.

  By the broken light of the moon, he could see that the risen animals had gone back to grazing on everything in sight. He couldn’t help thinking that, perhaps, they would discover more to graze on inside the hut, once the stench became strong enough. Just as long as it's not me getting eaten, he thought, but it still made his stomach turn.

  He slowly stepped outside, and nothing looked his way. He took another step—still safe. Then he walked faster, leaving the clearing behind, wishing he could leave the memories with it.

  Ordinary noises of the night accompanied him as he headed down what he hoped was the correct path back. If I am headed the right way, I’d better have a damn good story to tell. Though no story would be good enough if the nautded dogs came hunting and weren’t deterred by yungleaf sap. Now that the hermit was dead, who knew what would happen.

  After a while, a tall figure loomed out of the dark forest, and Erik’s pulse quickened. “Who’s there?” Erik croaked, his voice rising higher than he liked.

  “There you are!” Wil said cheerfully, still sounding beer-soaked.

  “And there you are.” His throat was raw from being squeezed shut, and words were difficult to pull out.

  “Well?” the man asked, all curiosity. “The hermit—what did you think?”

  Erik hesitated. “He wasn’t—”

  Wil slapped a hand to his forehead. “Oh, no. It went bad, didn’t it? He was mad someone led you here. He knows it’s me, doesn’t he?”

  “No, you’re fine, really—”

  “You don’t have to treat me lightly,” Wil growled. “I’m a man that takes his truth like his liquor: straight and fast. Tell me, was he mad at me?”

  “No, no. You’re all right, I swear.” He reached forward to put a hand on the man’s shoulder, but as he raised it, he froze. The sleeve of his good arm was dark with blood.

  He quickly put it back down, but it was too late. From the stillness of Wil’s silhouette, Erik knew he had seen it.

  “Was that…” he asked.

  “Yes, it’s blood,” Erik said quickly. He had to say something, anything before the man jumped to any conclusions. The right conclusions. “It’s just—”

  Wil burst into laughter. “Blood!” he cried. “Of course it’s blood! The old ‘fidel had you drink a vat of it, I’ll bet, mixed with the polleny fek o’ fairies and dust o’ cloves to boot.” He laughed again, his hand slapping Erik’s shoulder.

  That hand made Erik tense, more than a bit of the fight left in him. “Yes,” he said, his voice sounding strange to himself. “You got the gist of it.”

  Wil chuckled and gave him a discomforting shake. “Well, I’ll look forward to hearing what rumors spread back to the town when the witches and whelps go out to pay him a visit. Drinking blood.” He couldn’t shake his giggles.

  Pay him a visit. Erik felt a shiver of fear go through him. Just one more town to hate and hunt me. He couldn’t blame them if they called him a monster now. Even if the hermit had just been a nekromist.

  “Well,” Wil said, his voice weighty again, “guess the old maid will tan my hide for being late anyway, but I’d best head back.” He turned his head, eyes catching the moonlight at just the right angle to shine, and Erik remembered the shimmering eyes of the hermit, wide with fear. “You have someplace to go?”

  Erik vaguely waved about. “The forest is a good enough home for me."

  The tanner shook his head. “You’re a strange man,” he said. “What’d you say your name was again?”

  “Erik.” It was out before he realized it, but with all that had happened—with all that the tanner had done, and all that would happen when his small town found the bodies in the forest hut—he thought the man deserved at least that sliver of truth.

  “Erik,” Wil repeated. “It en't my place to comment, but hell, if you can tolerate the hermit's oddities, I'm betting you aren't much bothered by much."

  The tanner ran a hand over his hair, and Erik swallowed, wondering what was coming. "Erik," Wil started again, "it seems to me you've got some demons in you, same as me. Different, but all bad spirits hark from the Void, don’t they? If they’re what you went to the hermi
t about, well, I'll warrant you came away empty. Hermit can't help with those sorts of demons, and Fontfolk can't neither, my schooling taught me enough of that. No, I reckon it's up to each man himself to wrestle his devils down, and come out on top if he can."

  Erik let the words wash over them, the part that could engage with the thoughts still numb from the violence in the hut. The violence from his hands.

  "Anyway," the big man said, sticking out his own hand, “this is so long. May the Mother gather you in her great, round tits all your nights, and shine her life-giving cunt on you all your days.” He grinned wide.

  Erik looked at that hand a moment. Take it, he told himself, but his hands wouldn’t move. Hands thick with blood—how could he shake this man's hand, who had only been honest and generous, helping him when he had no reason to?

  Erik couldn't see his expression in the dark, but Wil eventually put down his hand. "All right, then. Farewell."

  "Farewell.” Erik watched as the tanner turned away, became just another dark shape among the shadowed trees, then disappeared into the night.

  He soon wished he hadn’t let the tanner go so quickly. As he traveled through the forest, the moon became lost behind the thickening canopy, and he lost his sense of direction. Still, if he followed the slope up to the base of Mt. Brunnen and made it to the sea, he could find Kuust by traveling northeast along the shore. He’d get there eventually. And find the Magpie, for whatever good it will do.

  Still, he’d never make it if he didn’t find water. He gripped the surinx tighter.

  The trees changed, a few of the taller and thicker lachtrunks growing up around him. That was a good sign. Where there were lachtrunks, there was water. But he couldn’t drink it from the dirt like them. I can’t even drink like a normal man.

  With his companion gone, the night settled over his shoulders like loneliness. He heard the wind as whispers, saw the lunegazers as eyes and, everywhere, the solemn, straight trees were silent witnesses to his passage. He alone was awake on Erden Isle. Him, and the nekros wandering the forests and shores.

  Then came the paranoia. Those shining lunegazers—perhaps they were eyes after all. Perhaps they were nightstalkers among the trees or some sort of demon-stricken owls, spying and telling on his every move. The wind rustling the leaves became creatures moving through the darkness. If he were attacked now, there’d be no one to save him. He might lay out here, his body torn apart, his mind decaying, slowly growing mad.

  Again, he thought of the lurcher in the forest. He’d doomed that poor creature, that once-woman, to the same fate, as well as the lurcher in the hermit’s hut. What have I done?

  His foot splashed in something, and he blinked down at it, hard to rouse from his dark thoughts. But the prospect of water was just enough to do it.

  But it wasn’t any water he wanted in his body. It was just the spat up meal of a bloatoad. The round thing was as big as his foot, but its ambiguously dark hue made it hard to see. Erik knelt next to it. A bloatoad was as good as a scuttler for a guide to water, as long as he could keep track of it in the darkness. Poking it with his toe, he used his boot as a shepherd’s cane, he prodded the slimy creature towards what was hopefully its home.

  He didn’t walk far before his guide gave him the slip. It had led him to water, all right—stinking mire water. Even if the elixir prevented him from getting sick from sludge in his veins, he didn’t like to think of the stuff accumulating in his body. Maybe I could let it settle, let the dirt fall to the bottom, and take the water from the top. Yet that would require him to wait, wasting precious time, and how would he get the dirt out? There was nothing for it—he’d have to find another source.

  Sighing, he traveled along the small swamp, hoping it might lead to a more substantial water source. Its edges were murky and ill-defined by the plants that grew around it, and Erik found his boots growing wetter and wetter in one hidden puddle after another. He circled the whole thing, and was about to give up, when his foot found deeper water than before. A stream.

  Thank the Mother and every blighted one of her Daughters, he thought, more than a bit earnest. He followed it, kneeling every once in a while to see if it became clearer by the thin moonlight, and smiling every time it did, and soon he found himself on the shore of a pond. How big it was, he couldn’t tell in the darkness that lingered, though the orange glow of the rising sun peeked just above the trees. It was nothing like the huge Fek Lake, the saltwater expanse dominating the middle of Erden Isle, or the much smaller Wuud’Lach outside of Zauhn, but water was water when it came down to it.

  Kneeling on the muddy shore, Erik washed the lingering gore from himself as best he could, gasping at the shock of cold, then dipped the surinx’s chamber in. He held it up and examined it. Water, clearer than the glass itself. He wanted to drink it the way he was meant to—his dry throat throbbed at the thought—but that wouldn’t do anymore, unless he wanted it up as soon as it was down.

  Placing it on the ground, he grabbed the needle at the end of the leather snake and held it between his fingers. He rolled back the sleeve from his stitched arm and hunted for a vein, and set to inserting the needle.

  Then he stopped. He’d almost forgotten the most important step: priming the pump. He worked the clamp next to the needle until water dripped out of the end of it. While small air bubbles entering the blood weren’t a problem, a whole tube’s worth could be. His father had once assured him it would kill him, but now that he was dead, it would just leave him in excruciating pain and raving mad.

  Carefully, he placed the tip of the needle on the skin and stabbed it in, then pumped the clamp and felt the water move into his veins. He went slowly; too fast and it gave them a bloated feeling, like one’s stomach after too much meat. Over and over, his hand opened and closed the clamp, and he stared out over the pond, slowly becoming colored by the sun.

  Then he noticed shining eyes stared back. And when he blinked this time, they didn’t disappear.

  He had the small protection of the pond, but the nightstalker—it had to be one this time—wouldn’t be deterred by that, nor by the cloying sap still pasted over his body. And here he was, pumping water into his arm, even more helpless than before, for what good it was worth. Erik was about to pull it from his arm when he saw there wasn’t just one pair of eyes. Two, four, six— More and more seemed to pop out from between the dark tree trunks, watching him from the other shore. As if things weren’t bad enough.

  Perhaps this was what he deserved. He’d doomed two nautded to torture and murdered two men, even if they were both nekromists. Still, his justice had come. Kneeling, feeling calmer and more serene about it than he ought to have, he watched and waited, and kept slowly pumping in water.

  Another shadow moved from the tree line. It was upright, walking on two legs; a man-like being, if a slight one, from its shadowed silhouette, and its eyes glowed like the nightstalkers’. The Talstalker, it had to be—the demon who invaded homes with his pack of cat-like nekros, tearing the place apart and leaving any inside dead or dying or missing altogether. Recruitments for A’Qed’s army, for the second Incarnation. It didn’t seem so vague a possibility now.

  Serenity suddenly left him, and something cold and creeping replaced it. Keeping an eye on the swarm of eyes and pacing Talstalker, Erik yanked the needle from his arm and pressed his sleeve into the open wound, then stood and faced them. He could run, but they would chase him down. He could fight, but they would tear him apart. So he did neither of these things. He stood and waited for them to make the first move, blood pounding in his ears.

  The minutes passed. The sunlight crept along the surface of the water, almost moving under the shade of the trees. Soon, it would reach the feet of the nightstalkers, who were said to revile the daytime. Soon, it would cast away all the shadows and reveal the Talstalker for whatever it was.

  As sudden as water dousing coals, the eyes blinked out, all except the pair belonging to the standing shadow. It just continued to pace, thou
gh it, too, avoided the sunlight. Erik, hand fiddling nervously over the hilt of his knife, wasn’t sure if this was good or bad.

  With just the two of them alone, Erik expected it to speak or make some noise, but it remained silent. Long moments stretched out, each one kept time by the pulsing tension in his temples. He wondered if it had been a man, and if it could speak after all.

  Then he began to feel a strange sensation. It felt like ripples of warm water poured over his thoughts, through his mind, down his body. The water vibrated within in him, almost pleasant, calming and soothing his anxiety. He instinctively pulled back, but it reached forward all the more insistently, not to be denied, and with a sudden wave, a cascade of senses filled his thoughts: running, hunting in the rustling darkness; the hiss of warm blood, the lust for it; thirty feral creatures howling long and hot, the bright, broken moon hanging above; a blanket of frost and mist covering a man shivering into a long sleep; the pale faces of dead men, dead women, dead children, and the silence of their empty breaths. And, strongest of all, the endless sea stretching all around but for a sandy peninsula, dyed bloody red with sunset, leading to a small pool of drifting mist.

  “Stop!” It was out before he realized it, but he didn’t have time to regret it, as another sensation appeared in him, multiplying, like a hive of bees had awoken and buzzed about his body. He felt sick with them, full of their venom, and his body rocked and writhed as they moved from his head to his fingers to his feet. But with the pain came a certain humming pleasure, a vague elation. He felt as if he might dive into the pond and breathe the water. He thought he might rise into the sky and fly away.

  Then the vibrations retreated and the sensations left him sweating and empty. Erik, drained to the core, collapsed to his knees, and lifted his head with effort to stare at the dark being. Its eyes stared back.