by Greg Curtis
Eventually she began the long, painful project of standing up. And somewhere during that it occurred to her that her grandfather had more and better spells of healing than she did.
“Grandfather, help me!”, Carrie cried, collapsing to the ground once more. “I need healing and your spells are far stronger than mine!”
“I’m sorry.” He shook his head, sadly. “I can't. I don't have any magic anymore. He has the magic!”
“He?” Someone else had her grandfather's magic? That didn't make sense to Carrie.
“He! Him! It! The voice in the darkness! The thing that dwells in me! He lives and breathes and walks through me! And he's utterly evil!”
The demon! He meant the demon, she realised. But he didn't know that that was what it was.
“It's a demon!” She told him. “The Priests say it’s the Demon of Death. That you've been possessed by it.”
But they had never said that the demon could control her grandfather's magic. She started arching her back, lifting her shoulders and head off the ground a little, and then after crying a little had to control the pain that burned through her.
“A demon? Of death?” Her grandfather sounded uncertain. “That doesn't seem likely. It's just evil. But I'm a wizard! Not a Priest!”
“Yolande said you cast a spell on yourself. One of perfect physical restoration.” She told him what she knew, wondering how he didn't know it. “She said it killed you. Because the perfect physically restored body you rebuilt wasn’t able to hold any life in it.”
“Yes … maybe … I don't know.” He stammered out the words almost as if he didn't know what they meant. “I…. can't remember exactly. I remember casting the spell and that's when he came. But dead? I don't know. What I do know was that I was floating. Trapped in my body. Unable to move. Trying desperately to hold on as something tried to pull me away. And then he came. He promised to help me. He lied!”
“Tell me.” Carrie knew she had to hear this. If she was to have any chance of saving him she had to know what had happened. And as she listened, the strength came to her to cast more spells of healing on herself and to start the long and agonising process of standing up.
“He came. He promised to help me – for a price. He said he wanted to know my memories. And to see the world through my eyes. Once he had done that he said he would be able to stand the darkness he lived in until his Father said he could go home. And he did save me. But then he stayed. I thought he'd go away once I had control again. Once I'd paid him. But he didn't go away after I gave him what he asked for. He stayed, a voice always there in my head, whispering to me from the darkness. Trying to twist me. To make me see the world differently. To see it as he did.”
“And slowly, little by little, he started bending me to his will. I fought. I fought every day, and I thought I was stronger. But he never grew tired. Never gave up. He just kept at it, wearing me down. Like the rain wears down the stone. Day after day, month after month, year after year. He never stopped.”
“It became harder to resist. To know what were his thoughts and what were mine. And to concentrate. My casting kept failing. I was trying again and again to get rid of him, and he kept redoing the words and the gestures as I struggled. He undid my spells. Turned them into other spells. It confused me. At times I didn't know if I was trying to get rid of him or me.”
“He whispered terrible things into my soul. Words of betrayal and treachery. Of deceit and lies. He made me think that I could trust no one. That everyone was trying to steal from me or kill me.”
“And finally, when he had worn me down and I was too tired to fight him he started taking complete control. I became a prisoner in my own body. I became the voice whispering in his soul. An echo of who I was.”
“But he's gone now?” Carrie had to ask. And then she put all her strength into another attempt to get up. It hurt and she screamed in pain. Something was very broken in her back.
“No!” He grandfather's voice suddenly turned shrill. “He's not gone! There is no gone! He has become a part of me. I can't get rid of him. He's always there, inside me, even now. But for the moment he's quiet. I think he’s been weakened and is hurting. For the first time in longer than I can remember I can think again. I know my own thoughts. But it won’t last. He will come back. Whatever you did to him, weakened him. But you didn't destroy him.”
Carrie remained kneeling on the ground, gasping for breath. Almost overcome with pain. Hearing his words almost destroyed her. He was telling her he had no hope. There was no chance of saving him. And that chance was all she had ever had. It was why she had been with the Priests.
“We can try again! Finish what was begun.” He had to agree! She needed to free him. To get him back. To once again have him return as the grandfather she had always loved and now so desperately needed.
“No! You don't understand. He's not dead. And he’s not finished either.” Her grandfather's voice shook as he spoke. He looked like he was about to break down on the spot. “I don't think he can be killed.”
“He's a darkness. A thousand million black spiders devouring me piece by piece. My body, my mind and my soul. Attacking my thoughts. It makes it hard to know what's real and what isn't. What was a bad dream and what truly happened. When I have a thought, I don't know if it’s me thinking it – or if its him. And he's coming back!”
“Grandfather –,” she began.
“No! I don't have time child. You don't have time. He sent his golems to bring you here during the battle. He made me think I brought you here but it was actually him. I see that now. He wants to make you a hostage. Something to use against me.”
“But finally he's weak enough that I can think again. For now I can fight him as I did at the start when I was stronger. And while he’s still weak you have to escape.”
“Run! Tell the others. Tell them that this thing has to be stopped. That if he's not stopped he will destroy everyone. Eat everything. Because that's what this thing is. A hunger.”
“He lies. He deceives. He tempts. But always he has only one desire, to eat. To consume all life. He has to be stopped.”
Carrie could hear the desperation in his voice. Desperation and fear. She also didn't doubt that he meant what he said. Not once she finally made it to her feet and looked around to see she was standing on a piece of clay road in the town of Coldwater – an intersection maybe fifty feet square – and surrounded by more golems, though these ones were inanimate. They stood twenty feet tall and were made of iron. Brutal, cold iron. Apparently the demon hadn’t cast the spells to activate them yet for which Carrie thanked Sirtis. Oddly enough, they were all holding hands. Their feet were stretched out wide so that they touched one another.
They were forming a wall, she realised. Keeping everyone out. Keeping her in.
“How do we destroy it?” She didn't want to ask the question because she already knew the answer. But she had to hear it from him. She had to know.
“You don't. You can't. You destroy me! Destroy this body! Then he will have no foothold left to cling to. He won’t die but he will be forced to return to the darkness.”
“But that …” Her voice trailed off.
“I know. But it's the only way. For me as well as for you. I'd rather be dead than trapped in this living nightmare. And I am trapped. There is no escape for me.”
“No!” But her voice was only a whisper. Because even as she tried to deny him she knew he was telling her the absolute truth. That it had to be done.
“But, I love you.” She whispered her pain.
“And I love you too, child. You are not only all that's left of my family: You're the best of it. My true hope. And at the end my love for you was all that I could hold to when I knew nothing else. I want you to live.”
“But this thing in me, it doesn't care about you. It doesn't care about anyone. It just hungers. And if you don't stop him, he will kill you. He will kill everyone. He will consume the entire world in his hatred.”
Ther
e was conviction in his words. Certainty. The sort of certainty he hadn't shown in a great many years. And it frightened her.
Carrie didn't answer him. She couldn't. In any case, she knew he wouldn't listen. He never listened when he thought he was right. But she also knew that this time he was right. It was why she turned and made her way painfully over to the iron golems, tears sliding down her cheeks as she did so. And then ironically, after all the effort she'd made to stand up, she suddenly found that she had to get back down on her hands and knees and try to slither between their legs like a snake.
It hurt. In truth the pain was excruciating. But the pain as she forced her broken body to do things it shouldn’t be capable of was nothing compared to the pain in her heart. And when she cried out, it was that which made her cry.
Somehow she made it through, and then slowly climbed to her feet again. Once again on two feet she headed back to the Priests. Each step was agony as she forced her broken bones to carry her. But she forced herself to walk, even while trying to control her breathing, because if she breathed too deep, her lungs scrapped over the ends of her broken ribs and caused excruciating pain.
And she kept on walking. She did not look back.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Exhaustion had become very much a part of his life, Edrick decided. After days spent in the fields doing nothing more than wandering from patient to patient and granting them as much of his magic as he could, Edrick was now convinced that it would be like this forever. But he carried on regardless. As did the others.
The final tallies of the dead and injured were in, or at least the estimates. And the breakdown of the dead and injured was almost symmetrical. Strangely so. One third were dead. One third were alive but seriously injured. And one third had escaped almost without injury. All of which meant that of an army of five thousand soldiers, three hundred Priests, maybe forty wizards and two and a half thousand camp followers, he now had just under three thousand patients.
Of course he wasn't working alone. A dozen other wizards were working with him as healers, Priests were praying for the sick and injured and the camp followers were doing their best to take care of the day to day business of running a camp.
The thing that struck him was how uniformly spread the numbers were. Just as with the soldiers, a dozen more wizards roughly, were lying on the ground being cared for and sadly another dozen were dead. Similarly, a hundred Priests were among the patients while a hundred more were in the ground and the last hundred were trying to keep the soldiers' spirits good and deal with the funerals. The endless funerals. It was a fearful symmetry.
Edrick would have expected that a sense of order would have arisen after three days. It hadn't though and instead he was seeing growing desperation and despair – especially among the soldiers. It was because the rule of thirds had broken down in respect of one group – the leaders. Like everyone else, one third of them were dead. But the other two thirds were all injured. Too broken to lead the men. Without the chain of command, everything had been left in disarray. A few minor officers and the Priests were trying to organise things, but with only limited success. The soldiers didn't want to listen to them. They blamed the Priests for not protecting them from what had happened and it went against the grain to take orders from those who weren't their commanding officers.
It didn’t help that most of the men were still in shock. None of them had ever been through a battle as terrible as the one they'd faced. The deaths were horrific, and most had lost friends as well as comrades in arms. Personally, Edrick thought it was the nature of the battle that had really damaged their confidence. A battle in which they had found themselves completely defenceless and unable to even tell what direction the enemy was coming from.
Normally, there was an order to a battle. The enemy would be at one end of the field, they at the other. there would be an advance and formations and then a set of tactics would be played out. The soldiers had been trained to handle that. To always know where danger was coming from. But when winged serpents were suddenly striking them from all sides and in the dark, all their training had been found wanting. They hadn't known what to do. As a result, many of them were now broken in spirit as well as body. It would be a long time before they recovered. Edrick guessed that some of them never would.
He didn’t need to be able to see the future to know what their futures held. Many would leave the army as soon as they could and give in to the demons of drink as they tried to wash away the fear that lived in their souls. The cities, at least those he had visited in his youth, had been filled with ex-soldiers, down on their luck and reduced to penury. Men who had discovered in the heat of battle that the soldier's life was not a life they could live. But none of them he would guess had ever been through a battle like this one. None had ever known such terror and helplessness.
Now at least half of the soldiers that were still able to stand, were spending their days lost in the vapours of ale and wine. The other half were making plans to desert. The last thing any of them could deal with was the thought of going into another battle like this again.
And yet, if what Carrie had told them was correct, that was exactly what they were going to have to do. The news that the demon still lived, and was simply regaining his strength, had gone through the camp like a disease. Within hours he could see the sickness in everyone's eyes. But Carrie had been right to tell them.
Carrie. Edrick’s heart twisted as he thought of all she had been through. His heart had sung when he’d first set eyes on her again and known that she was alive. But his happiness had been short lived when, after making it back to camp a couple of days ago, she’d informed the Priests of what she’d learned and then promptly collapsed. She was still in one of the sick tents that had been set up and was being treated by the other wizards. Those with greater healing skills than he. She hadn't been able to answer any further questions. Most importantly she couldn't tell them how long they had. In fact she still hadn't regained consciousness though Master Thatchwell had said that she would once she had recovered sufficiently from the stress, injuries and exhaustion. Still, Edrick worried about her.
Meanwhile he had since found out that his father was alive, but had left. He was in the back of a wagon now, being slowly carried back to Rivernia and the family home. It would be a long time before he was up and running around again. With two broken legs and one arm that was almost shattered, ribs busted and his jaw broken, he would need a lot of healing. But at least he would recover, even if he couldn't give any orders. He could barely speak. Edrick was glad he had survived but more than that he couldn’t say.
The remaining soldiers were now waiting for his replacement to arrive. No one knew who it would be or when he'd show. And until he did, they had no orders and weren't in any hurry to find any. For them the bottom of a bottle called. Edrick couldn't exactly blame them for that. He was tempted to do the same. If nothing else it might help with the nightmares. But he had responsibilities. Besides which, he worried that if he started drinking he wouldn't stop.
“You should rest.” Yolande's voice came from just behind Edrick as he worked.
“Everyone should rest.” He didn't turn around, continuing instead to concentrate on his spell. “Including you.”
“We have more members of the Guild arriving. A hundred at least. And they should begin arriving today. They will help with the patients.”
Edrick finished his spell, allowing his patient to sink once more into his sleep. At least he would be a bit more comfortable as Edrick had focused on reducing the pain of his injuries. He turned to her. “A hundred wizards? That seems a lot.”
“We made a mistake here in only bringing a few of our more senior members and their aides. We weren’t fully prepared for what Wilberforce would throw at us. We thought the Priests would have that under control and we had no idea what we would face. We won't make that mistake again.”
Tiredness and despair had aged her, Edrick thought. The lines of her face seeme
d more deeply ingrained than before. Bags had formed under her eyes from having been awake too long. She was also leaning on a staff more heavily than he would have liked to see, no doubt due to the injury her right ankle had taken. But then he suspected he didn't look any better himself.
“But I fear we will,” he answered her. “We're just wizards and we’re up against some sort of fallen god. I don't know that we will ever be able to face this thing and win.”
“We don't have to. We only have to face whatever he throws at us. The Priests are the ones who'll deal with him. There are many more of them coming as well. And the demon is weakened. Greatly weakened.”
“We hope,” Edrick replied sourly. After the battle they had just come through, he wasn't completely sure what words like strong and weak meant any more. “But you heard what Carrie said.”