Lethal Red Riding Hood (Dark Goddess Chronicles Book 1)

by Leonard Wilson

  While Ulric closed with the knight, Keely slipped the gauntlet off her left hand and flung it in a high arc over Ulric’s head. “Pixus poxus!” she shouted—the first nonsense to pop into her head—and struck what she hoped was a threatening pose. The ruse did its job, distracting the man into swatting away the flying gauntlet he was certain carried a terrible curse, and allowing Ulric to slip in under his guard.

  Ulric’s sword clanged harmlessly off of the knight’s armored torso, but he’d taken his cue from Nolan’s stroke of luck and was swinging to unbalance, not to cut. The man staggered just enough for Ulric to slam the haft of the hatchet into the knight’s knee, then yank the weapon back toward himself. The axe head caught the crook of the man’s leg as handily as a hook. His feet went out from under him, and he tumbled away into the pool like the man before him.

  Nolan’s hatchet and one of the lanterns had gone over the edge with the knights, but Ulric had managed to catch the second lantern and Keely was able to recover her gauntlet as they splashed past.

  From above came the frenzied sounds of battle as the deadlings engaged their unprepared opponents. If anyone from the Inquisition had actually engaged a deadling in the forest and returned to tell the tale, they’d managed to come back without useful information from the encounter. More likely, none had returned at all.

  From the sound of things, too, few of Jane’s followers had ever come face-to-face with anything more supernatural than an old woman with a bad squint. They were not, as a unit, holding together gracefully. Still, whether chasing Keely or fleeing from the deadlings, several more lanterns were headed their way down the long curve of the staircase.

  “Through here,” Ulric commanded, ducking into a side tunnel just as a knight and an inquisitrix came splashing into view.

  Clay wasn’t terribly surprised when he heard the eerie chorus of deadlings begin to echo through the tunnels. What had surprised him was that it had taken the next nightmare so long to arrive.

  For several hours after he’d woken up to find Sabina’s head in his cell, he’d left it untouched—certain that it would either spring back to life or transform into something worse if he did reach for it—but eventually he’d broken down and slipped it back into its former owner’s cell without incident. That had seemed the least indecent option available to him.

  After that, excepting the fact that he’d begun to get hungry, his captivity had become blissfully dull again until the untended lights had sputtered and gone out, leaving him alone in the pitch black with his imagination. When the howling started, he had felt around for the stew bowl—the closest thing to a weapon he had available—and settled in to wait with his back against the wall.

  He was still crouched there, listening to the howling growing louder and louder, when lantern-lit chaos burst out of the entrance to the cell block. No less than half a dozen men and women appeared amidst a mass of writhing, thorny vines peppered randomly with red-eyed skulls. Some of the people seemed to be fighting the rest of the people while the vines seemed to be trying to throttle and ensnare all of them.

  Blades flashed. Skulls smashed. Now and again, blood spattered from slashing blades or lashing thorns. One woman in black got pulled completely off her feet by a throttling vine, and she hung there choking while the battle raged around her.

  Then in the midst of the chaos, he saw her—his silver-haired guardian—and something that he’d once thought of as hope timidly smoldered up in the embers that remained of his soul. She and her companions seemed to have allied themselves in a desperate fight against the people in black and red.

  She had dressed all in red, too—the other she, the real witch who’d started this all. He’d barely seen that monster at all since the silver-haired one had shown up, but he’d never be able to forget the witch’s torments even if he had a dozen lifetimes to do it in. It didn’t take much for him to conclude that the combatants in red and black were minions of the monster, and that any aid he could render against them would be fighting for whatever fragments might remain of his own sanity.

  So when the vines pinned one of them up against the bars of his cell, Clay helped himself to the cudgel hanging from the man’s belt and started beating on him through the bars. It didn’t seem to do much. The man was well-armored. Still, it felt good to be making even a token gesture to fight back, and the man was far too busy dealing with the vines to retaliate against Clay.

  Clay got so into taking his petty vengeance that he failed to notice when the vines came for him, too. He didn’t even notice he was having trouble breathing until after he noticed the blood dripping into his eye from where the thorns had left a nasty gash across his forehead. He clawed reflexively at the vine that had wrapped around his throat, wondering when he would wake up again, and where.

  Then the silver-haired woman was there, laying about her with a pair of axes, dismembering the vines that held Clay fast, shattering any bodiless skulls that came within reach.

  “Evadne! Evadne! I’m so sorry, but we have to go!” Keely tugged at the arm of the big woman. Evadne was kneeling in front of what had been Sabina’s prison cell with her head resting against the bars and her hands gripping them so tightly that part of Keely was waiting for the iron to break.

  They’d come through the fight only slightly bloodied, more by virtue of being prepared for the deadlings than by being able to directly overpower the knights and black-hoods that had caught up with them. Ulric and Nolan were capable fighters, but this hadn’t been like it had been when Tobias and Baldassare danced with the Inquisition. For a strictly fair, one-on-one fight, the forces of the Inquisition were better-trained and better-prepared than the Haywoodshire guardsmen.

  This skirmish had been won on little things, like most of the opposition fighting with only a single weapon—leaving them easier for the deadlings to pin—and gorgets having become less-valued equipment for the modern knight as gunpowder on the battlefield reduced the relative value of a pound of armor.

  In this fight, too, the Inquisition had expected speed for countering a witch’s hex to be more important than steel armor to repel a blade. Some of the knights had simply chosen to forgo gorgets, and blackhoods rarely wore them anyway.

  “Who did this?” Evadne demanded of Clay through gritted teeth.

  “I think it was one of that lot,” Clay said, surprising even himself at this point with his relative clarity of thought and speech, especially given the state of his nose. “They’re Inquisition, ain’t they? I remember a man. We thought he was the jailer. Took her away. Then he came back without her, dressed like them, talkin’ about witches, and he…” He waved a hand toward the mess of his face. “When I woke up, he was gone, and…I’m sorry. She was nice.”

  “Big man?” Keely asked. “Dark hair? Neat beard? Handsome devil?”

  “Yeah. Yeah. Yeah,” Clay said. “I expect you’d call him that. Know him?”

  “Riordan,” Keely said. “It was Sir Riordan. With any luck, he drowned back there.”

  “If he didn’t, he’s mine,” Evadne hissed, pushing off the bars to force herself back to her feet.

  “I promise I’ve got more claim on him than you do,” Keely said, “but if he is still alive, I’ll share.” She shoved a hatchet into Clay’s hand, re-arming herself with a short sword one of the priestesses had dropped.

  “We haven’t seen the last of these things,” she said, gesturing toward fragments of skull and vine scattered across the floor. Protect your throat, try to keep your hands free. If you see a chance to get out in the open and run, take it, and don’t look back. Just make sure you’re running away from the forest.”

  The sound of more deadlings coming up fast spurred them to action, and the group resumed its flight through the tunnels of the Wolf’s Tooth with Clay in tow. A quick right and a couple of lefts brought them back out into the main shaft. Lightning still flickered and thunder still rumbled and water still sheeted down from above, obscuring the central part of the shaft from where they stoo
d on the stair.

  “What’s that sound?” Evadne asked, straining to distinguish a new thread that had joined the chaotic chorus of storm and conflict and howling laughter.

  “Anchor me,” Keely said, grabbing Evadne’s wrist tightly and leaning out through the waterfall. At first, all Keely could see was the glimmer of torches and lanterns scattered randomly up and down the stairwell, their glow left dispersed and hazy by the surrounding curtain of water. Some of the lights were clearly being born by people in various stages of haste. Others remained unmoving, probably either mounted on the wall or dropped by people fleeing from—or overrun by—the deadlings.

  She could hear this new sound more distinctly, though—a low, agonized wail coming from somewhere below. Then the lightning flash directly overhead, lighting the entire shaft for one flickering moment, and it illuminated the toxic mess that surged below as if showing it in a series of still images.

  As best Keely could piece together in that moment, the deadlings had come bursting in through the tunnel faster than they could get clear at the end of it, forcing a steady stream of their number over the edge and into the central pool. The blind flailing of the deadlings who’d wound up in the water hadn’t had much success grasping anything but the vines of other deadlings, dragging them in after and creating a writhing green mass that buoyed up the already-flooding surface of the pool.

  From there, things had gotten ugly. There was no guessing how many of Jane Carver’s lot had wound up in the pool with the deadlings, but several surely had, bleeding profusely from gaping, thorny lacerations. Once they’d fallen, they’d have found themselves drowning in a merciless wall of rending thorns, and bled out completely, feeding their lives to the hungry dead in the great bone pit that lay beneath the surface.

  Keely’s imagination had already conjured all manner of terrors emerging from that sunken graveyard, and done so quite vividly, but it still hadn’t prepared her for the sheer, enormous horror of the reality.

  Bone-riddled, black mud geysered upward in columns, punching gaping holes in the writhing thicket of deadlings. Decapitated corpses clawed from the muck, grabbing blindly at any skull they could find to sloppily replace their missing heads. Others had started erratically swarming up the shaft like drunken spiders.

  A few still-living knights and priestesses could be seen caught up in the mess, all either being torn apart by bony hand and thorny vine or simply dragged down screaming—not that Keely could actually pick out individual screams above the cacophony of raging storm and howling dead.

  She’d been feeling already that she’d been thrown into a waking nightmare, but at this moment she found herself looking straight into the abyss.

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  The Last Waltz

  For a dreadful heartbeat, Keely realized she’d inadvertently let her grip on Evadne’s wrist slacken, and would have surely fallen had Evadne not been gripping her wrist so unfailingly. She wheeled for a moment, trying clumsily to grab Evadne’s other wrist, but Evadne sensed her distress immediately and hauled Keely back in through the rushing water.

  “Lovely, isn’t it?” The little girl in the red cape beamed as she paced up the curve of the stairs toward them, casually tumbling an over-sized axe back and forth between her hands. “You really did surprise me. Teaming up with the Inquisition? I never figured you could set aside your differences that long. And that High Inquisitrix girl’s tougher than you’d think, just to look at her. She’s got some serious blood in her. Still…”

  Bloody Scarlet paused in tumbling the axe to spread her arms and gesture at herself. “…here I am. Don’t let it get you down. You had a good run. Best hunt I’ve had in a hundred years, easy.”

  “We’re not done running, if it’s all the same to you,” Keely said, then turned to point the others on up the stairs. “Go!” They did. It was a voice that brooked no arguments.

  “You know what happens to people who make noble last stands?” Scarlet asked as Keely turned back to face her, sword and hatchet in hand. “They die. You’re a clever girl, but we’ve gone completely off script now, I think. You can’t top the Inquisition for brute force. You’ve got some strong blood too, but not that strong. Think maybe you can improvise another explosion? I’ll come back. Think you can throw me to my leftovers down a pit again? I’ll come back. I always come back, little girl. It’s what I do.”

  “Have you ever considered…I don’t know…tapestry weaving?” Keely asked. “It may not have the glamor of this whole ‘revenant’ thing, but it’ll keep out the drafts over the winter.”

  “Huh.” Scarlet stopped, leaning on her axe as her eyes rolled back and forth thoughtfully. “Never thought about it. You’re right, though. Terribly good for drafts.”

  “Keely!” Ulric bellowed. “Get up here, you idiot!”

  Keely turned and ran.

  Behind them, the little girl continued up the stairs in no particular hurry, mumbling pensively to herself. “Hmmm…Tapestry weaving?”

  With Ulric in the lead, they arrived at the tunnel leading out to what remained of the cathedral site, more than slightly winded from their rapid ascent. When he paused and looked to Keely, she glanced over her shoulder and found that they’d left Scarlet too far behind to judge where she might be. Keely nodded, and they hurried on out into the storm, trying to move as briskly as they could through the dark and the drenching wet while still recovering some breath.

  Around them, everything lay in ruin. All that remained of the tents that had once sheltered supplies and workers was a few rags of canvas that had gotten too caught up in the rubble to blow away in the storm. Scaffolding and other timbers lay blackened, broken, and hopelessly mingled with the chaotically tumbled stones that had once been the start of walls, columns, and buttresses.

  This hadn’t been the devastation of a pitched battle, but systematic and deliberate destruction, doubtlessly orchestrated by Jane Carver to pin on the locals and deny them any hope of support from Pontifine Augusta. Not a single standing structure cast its silhouette against the lightning that flashed across the sky.

  What did cast silhouettes was the deadlings swarming up off the only trail to the site and crawling over the ruins in a thick mass.

  “Yeah,” Nolan said. “Not getting out that way.”

  “Looks more inviting than going back down the way we came,” Keely assured him. Her eyes lit on the freshly bloodied remains of a horse out among the ruins—almost certainly Minda’s horse—but she kept the observation to herself. Minda would be alive, because…well, she had to be. If Minda hadn’t finished her job, there could be no doubt now that Scarlet would finish hers.

  “We go up,” Ulric said grimly. “Now, before she cuts us off from behind, or we die right here.”

  The distance remaining to be climbed up the central shaft to the summit of the Wolf’s Tooth seemed unfairly long, given how far they’d already come. On the other hand, once they reached the summit, that was it—no way up, no way down, no way out—so each aching step represented another precious second of life. Not exactly a cheerful thought, but the best Keely could come up with to console herself while she pushed the burning lungs and aching legs past what she normally thought of as their limits.

  They passed a few more openings on the way up, but the narrowing spire of the Tooth didn’t leave much room for tunnels near the top, and even Keely had done enough exploring here to know those only led to store rooms where the Haywoods had laid in supplies for the anticipated siege.

  At last, they emerged once more into the storm, this time standing at the pinnacle of the Wolf’s Tooth and its moss-covered ruins. The slightly concave structure of the pinnacle had been too subtle to notice the first time they’d been up here, but the shallow, bowl-like shape surrounding the central shaft collected every bit of water the storm poured at the top of the Tooth and funneled it straight into the shaft. By the time the water got there, it had already picked up enough depth and speed to threaten to drag anyone who managed to
slip and fall straight over the edge with it.

  “We’ve really got to stop meeting like this,” Baldassare said, stepping out of the shadow and shelter of the ruined watchtower.

  “Oh…my…go’ss.” Keely gaped. “Baldassare, what are you even doing here?!”

  “We had to come back and warn you,” Baldassare said. “The Inquisition’s doubled back.”

  “We?” Keely asked darkly. “Where’s Jenny?”

  Huddled in her cloak against the rain and leaning on her walking stick, Elissa stepped out behind Baldassare and gave a sheepish wave. “It, uh…sort of didn’t work out like we expected. You’ve already figured out the Inquisition’s here, haven’t you?”

  “I was starting to suspect,” Keely admitted, her words punctuated by a crack of lightning and thunder.

  “We took a couple of wrong turns coming back,” Elissa said. “Then we nearly ran into the Inquisition ourselves. Then the deadlings…”

  “Okay. Okay. Got it,” Keely said, cutting off the explanations with a wave of her hands. “All right. No one’s dead yet,” she said to no one in particular. “Well, okay, a lot of people are dead, but at least they’re not us. Mostly aren’t us. I’m babbling. Stop it. Anyway…”

  “Tick-tock, tick-tick!” Scarlet called up the stairway. “Sands through the hourglass. Sundial’s…running out of sun, I guess.”

  “Your plan’s still on track, right?” Baldassare asked hopefully.

  “So far, exactly one thing went like it was supposed to,” Keely said. “Where’s Minda? Is she here, too?”

  “Was she supposed to be?” Baldassare asked.

  Keely threw her head back and screamed. The effect was very dramatic for all of a second or two before the scream was choked off by the rain falling into her mouth, and it turned into more of a gurgle. “Gimme,” she said, yanking Baldassare’s sword out of its sheath and pressing the smaller one on him to replace it. “We’re all going to be dead before you’re fit to use this again, anyway.”