Knight and Champion

by Steven J Shelley

  Adalita’s presence gave Tanis equal cause for disquiet. Seated halfway down the table, the ranger was held in the thrall of a drug the witch had administered. It had supposedly slowed her heart and brain in order to “mend her insides”. Naturally, Tanis found it difficult to take the witch at her word. In any case, his companion was pale, glassy-eyed and mostly unresponsive. Yes, she was alive, but at what cost? He was nowhere near foolish enough to believe the witch would nurse her back to health out of the goodness of her heart. Coming to the chapel had been a grave mistake - he needed to free Adalita and he needed to do it soon.

  “You don’t have to answer right now,” the witch cooed with a sickening smile. “You must eat. Build your strength.”

  Despite the distance between them, Tanis got a whiff of her perfume. At face value it smelled incredibly alluring, like sun-kissed woodland. But there was an obscene after-note, a hint of something truly horrid. As for the meal, it could only be described as strangely extravagant. Fruits, nuts and seeds sourced locally from the swamp. Strange cuts of meat Tanis couldn’t identify. Not human - the witch was far too intelligent for such an obvious stunt - but golden brown with a nutty aroma. Tanis was content to leave it on the plate, along with the live black nautili sliding across a glistening slab of cuttlefish.

  “I must like you,” the Tall Lady offered conversationally. “I travel to the Telsar Sea for such delicacies.”

  Though he was famished, Tanis limited himself to a bowl of cranberries, swamp-lily petals and ayare seeds. The high-energy mix went some way to reviving his flagging energy levels. Ever since his “breakout” with the dire hounds, his bones felt weak and brittle. Adalita mumbled something unintelligible as she pushed food around her plate. The Tall Lady smiled knowingly and popped a nautilus in her mouth, crunching the shell with relish.

  A squat figure emerged from the sacristy and shuffled to the table. Tanis couldn’t quite see its face under the thick, mud-encrusted cowl, but the cracked, scored shell on its back was unmistakable. The creature delivered a steaming casserole dish with the softest of grunts.

  “That will be all, Sospoya,” the witch said.

  The servant withdrew without so much as a glance at the witch’s guests.

  “I wish to leave with my friend,” Tanis said suddenly. “Coming here was a mistake.”

  The Tall Lady clicked her tongue, an altogether disturbing sound.

  “And yet come you did,” she said with perfectly hideous amiability. “Only natural that such a gallant young man would answer a lady’s call.”

  Tanis framed a retort but the truth was staring him in the face. He had answered the witch’s call. From the moment he’d laid eyes on the bone shrine he’d been drawn to Fenril Swamp, buoyed by the knowledge that he’d come face to face with the Tall Lady sooner or later.

  “Then you’d better tell me what you want,” Tanis said shortly.

  The Tall Lady gave a feminine chuckle. It didn’t fit with her hard voice at all, but then nothing in this chapel fitted together.

  “My needs are ridiculously simple, but someone in your position might not find them so,” she began.

  “Enough games,” Tanis said. “You recognized my taint and pulled me in. Are we supposed to be friends now? You killed my company. You left Ardennia wide open to elvish attack.”

  “The affairs of men are of no interest to me,” the witch pointed out.

  “Then what interests you?”

  “Loyalty. Passion. Most of all, that sublime product of the two - devotion.”

  Tanis found himself shaking his head.

  “I will not be your slave,” he said, surprising himself with the calm authority he projected.

  “Precisely what I wanted to hear,” the witch said, playing with a lock of her blue-black hair. It was thick and lustrous, but like everything else about The Tall Lady, there was too much of it. The lack of due proportion left him slightly nauseated.

  “I presume you harbor as much conviction when it comes to your friend here,” the witch said.

  “I do,” Tanis said without hesitation. “I care deeply about her.” He sensed it would be dangerous to mask his emotions at this point.

  “I don’t doubt it,” she said warmly. “I can feel it radiating from you like geothermal spring. For all intents and purposes, they last forever.”

  Silence descended and Tanis resisted the urge to strike out against his captor. The witch was in complete control. Indeed, the only unknown in all this was the true extent of his latent power.

  “Your instinct is to fight,” the witch said, watching him intently. “I’m excited by this development. You, dear boy, are a far cry from the tiny child that entered the Dawn Forest.”

  “You mock me.”

  “Not at all. I’m curious as to why you chose to continue through the forest when you could’ve returned home after the elves lost the scent.”

  Tanis stifled a flood of painful memories. How long had she been tracking his progress?

  “I don’t know,” he said at length. “Maybe I feared there was nothing to go back to.”

  “An understandable position. Losing members of your family can’t have been easy.”

  “Says the witch who just butchered twenty good people.”

  The Tall Lady laughed as if her guest had made a delightful bon mot.

  “For the record, I no longer see myself as human. Tell me - why did you really enter the forest?”

  “I told you, I -”

  “You told me what your soul wanted to hear. Humans routinely lie to their souls. It’s endlessly fascinating.”

  “I don’t know what you want me to say.”

  “Perhaps you want to tell me that you were tired of Guill. Tired of your family. Their massacre, whilst shocking and painful, was just the opportunity you needed.”

  “An opportunity for what?” Tanis asked, his anger rising.

  “An opportunity to rise from your dull, grey slumber.”

  Tanis could only assume she was referring to his taint.

  “You would style yourself as my mentor?” he asked incredulously, making it crystal clear what he thought of that.

  “Not quite,” the witch said. “In any case, I haven’t quite made up my mind about you.”

  Tired of being made to feel he was a step behind the game, Tanis wondered how he could gain the upper hand. He abandoned the notion of outright attack - such an approach could only end in humiliation. But, as Hadley liked to say, there was more than one way to turn a situation around. Riding the silence, his eye was drawn to the gallery of elaborate oil paintings. One in particular caught his eye - it depicted a man riding a chestnut horse along a lonely, windswept beach. The bearded rider was perhaps a little taller than the average human. His features were imperiously handsome and his pose could only be described as dashingly aristocratic. Clearly relishing the rugged environment, he stood high over the horse, willing it to greater heights. Something told Tanis the paintings were vaguely autobiographical. The Tall Lady didn’t seem the type to decorate her walls with empty prettiness.

  “Still holding a candle?” he asked, eyes locked on the painting. “I don’t envy him.”

  Bullseye. The witch’s other-worldly eyes flashed momentarily before she recovered her equilibrium. It was enough. It was enough to let Tanis know that there was a thinking, feeling entity in that grotesque body.

  “A man I knew a long time ago,” she explained. “In many ways he haunts me still.”

  It was the perfect opening for a glib, hurtful comment, but the witch was showing signs of opening up. Reminding himself to stay on his guard, Tanis opted for a softer tone.

  “How did you lose him?”

  “I allowed him to surrender his power,” the witch said in a flat tone. The subject was clearly difficult for her. “It was a foolish, naive thing to do and I will always regret it.”

  “Was he a lord of some kind?”

  “Yes. He elevated himself above the grasping politics and wars of
the day. He staked his claim to immortality and was living his life to the full when he met me.”

  “What’s your name?” Tanis asked. He figured it couldn’t hurt to absorb a little more detail. The witch looked up at him, perhaps searching for mockery.

  “Saskia,” she said. “Saskia Sylvian.”

  The thick magic in the room pressed. Tanis felt like the witch was filling him with knowledge. He was inundated with a feeling of gentle clarity. The chapel itself made more sense to him. Unless his exhaustion was leading him astray, he felt a strange kinship with the dark paintings. There was deep history at play here. He could almost feel the ebb and flow of time since the young, impossibly beautiful Saskia Sylvian buried the love of her life. A deity who had stepped down from his hallowed existence to be with a woman who would ultimately suck him dry. He was an honorary witness to the blood-rim of his death and his long, slow decay. Tears, tears falling unnoticed and silent. The rise and fall of Saskia’s consorts, like empires sparkling and fading on the fathomless stage of time. It was there, on the leading edge of Saskia’s desperately sad decline, that Tanis understood why he had been summoned to her sanctuary.

  “No,” he gasped, a stabbing coldness enveloping his heart. “The answer is no.”

  “I understand,” the witch said, rising from her chair and moving toward him. Mesmerized by her impossibly smooth gait, Tanis waited. Body and mind were entangled in a doomed war for supremacy. He knew he should be anywhere but here, in this mind-numbingly dangerous little chapel, but his body, imbued as it was with a living, near-sentient taint he would never vanquish, was basking in the witch’s grey energy. When Saskia Sylvian, widow of a thousand years, laid an elegantly monstrous hand on his left arm he flinched and hardened at the same time.

  “You are devoted to another,” Saskia purred, leaning against the table and sliding her hand to Tanis’s crotch. “Nothing makes me more excited.”

  Tanis froze, his body pleading for contact. He looked across at Adalita as the witch pulled his trousers down - the girl was dull-eyed and oblivious. Saskia held Tanis in her hands and leaned down to devour him. He squeezed his eyes shut, anything to banish that horribly misshapen face. A starburst of pleasure as contact was made. It withered on the vine as he imagined the witch’s rough, ribbed mouth and angular teeth. Never had his delicacy and his desire been such bitter enemies.

  “Don’t let me in,” Saskia growled at the tip of his manhood. “More fool you, boy.”

  “No,” Tanis agreed, trying to pull away.

  “Feel me,” the witch commanded, drawing Tanis’s hand between her legs. Her clothes were sodden. “This is where the abomination passed through. She died. My everything. Everything.”

  Groaning, Saskia pressed Tanis’s hand against her. She was so hot he thought he might burn.

  “My lord, very much mortal by then, died from grief,” she gasped. “Consorts have been drifting in and out ever since.”

  Saskia’s eyes widened and she finally released Tanis’s hand.

  “Refuse me, Tanis,” she implored. “I won’t judge. I’m too old for that.”

  “Yes!” Tanis said, pushing the witch away and restoring his trousers. The air had become so heavy, so oppressive, that he struggled to breathe. The plates before him shimmered and wavered sickeningly. The only item in the room that seemed stable was the painting of the horseman. Tanis looked deep into his commanding face and felt like he was almost standing on that beach. His peripheral vision turned sickly yellow and teased the edges of his consciousness. At length he had the vague impression he was swimming, deliriously concluding that he was immersed in his own brain fluid. A pinprick of light appeared at the end of the tunnel and he stroked furiously toward it. Rewarded with a nourishing bath of golden light, he climbed onto a familiar stool and watched Vesna scrubbing dishes.

  “Thanks for dinner, mama,” he murmured. It was a strange thing for a boy to say. Normally he and his siblings simply finished their plates and headed out to the yard. Vesna smiled at her second-eldest son.

  “Nice of you to say, sweetheart. I enjoy meal time. It’s the only chance we get to talk.”

  As Vesna set about completing her chore, Tanis felt tears streaming down his face.

  “You broke my heart,” he blurted, grief overwhelming him. “I hate you for leaving me.”

  Vesna looked up at Tanis, but the vision dissolved before he could read her face. He found himself sitting on a patch of wet grass in front of the Chapel. Adalita was draping their sodden mats over a rock to dry them out.

  “You’re back,” she said in a tight voice. “Lost you for a while there.”

  “What happened? Weren’t we just inside?”

  Adalita cocked her head.

  “I remember a sea of dull, formless dreams. When I woke up next to you, I was fully healed. I haven’t checked inside the chapel. All I know is that she’s gone.”

  The ranger took a deep breath, as if she was trying to remain strong.

  “We should bury the others and be on our way. Whatever happened in the chapel is over now, Tanis. We’re free.”

  Tanis nodded blankly. The Tall Lady had apparently seen fit to release both of them. He vaguely remembered refusing her something. Something important. Whatever it was, she’d obviously felt compelled to leave. Adalita’s instincts were true - Fenril Swamp buzzed with fresh activity and felt like a living, breathing wetland. No longer humming with with menace, the chapel just seemed like a broken-down ruin, lost to antiquity.

  “On second thought, let’s load up now,” Adalita suggested. “I’m keen to put this place behind us.”

  Tanis nodded - it was a perfectly reasonable request. He savored the clear blue sky, the shimmering curtain of insects, the occasional plop of amphibians in the tranquil pools. Nodding a second time, he stood, approached Adalita and placed both hands around her neck.

  “Tanis!” she exclaimed.

  It wasn’t hard to kill her. The taint flowed freely through his fingertips. He summoned so much decay at the point of contact that his fingers sank beneath Adalita’s withered skin. He chuckled at the cool, fleshy sensation. His opposing fingers reached each other and her head toppled forward, brushing against his jerkin on its way to the mud. Shaking from the effort, he withdrew his bloodied hands and let the decapitated body fall.

  The softest hint of laughter drifted across the swamp. She controlled him now, just like she had all her other ‘consorts’ throughout history. What did it matter? She wasn’t nearly as bad as one might’ve expected. In fact, Tanis was surprised he’d ever been negatively disposed to her.

  He smiled as he rolled his mat and checked the sun’s position. At least two hours left in the day. With any luck, without foolish rangers to slow him down, he would reach the Dawn Forest by sundown. Emptying his mind with ridiculous ease, he embarked on his trek at an easy gait. No one had ever told him how delicious it was to be free.

  15 - Hadley

  Dawn laid a hesitant arm around a ragged, bleeding town. The sun appeared over the top of Overlook to reveal a scene of blackened devastation.

  Ignoring his advisers’ protests, the Governor had insisted on surveying the scene from the questionable safety of the Sanctum Wall. Hadley stood close, devouring the finer details of enemy placement and disposition. For the moment, the orcs had stood down their terrifying siege. All night they had bombarded the Nook with “devil’s dew” - huge, heavy balls of mashed dirt, rolled foliage and tar-like pitch. The ammunition was infamous across Elesta for its ability to achieve terror and destruction. Foregoing the patience required to keep their prize intact, the orcs had demonstrated a willingness to steamroll their way through Andra if they had to. The first phase of bombardment, commencing precisely at dusk the previous day, was as aggressive an attack as any the people of Andria were likely to see.

  Of course, Ballist had taken the precaution of withdrawing Nook citizens behind the Sanctum wall. Hadley knew his real reason for doing so, but for the moment it was enough
that the good folk of Andra felt valued and protected. The night had been hard. Marshaling thousands of frightened civilians through the Sanctum gates had proved extremely difficult. So far the death toll was estimated to be less than thirty individuals. Things could be a lot worse. Hadley had spent most of the night watching the fiery attack from a west-facing balcony at Overlook. She hated being so removed from the action, but Sandor refused to let her near the Sanctum wall while the siege was live. As it happened, the enemy catapults - commandeered from Duskovy Castle - did not have the range for attacks on Sanctum. At least not on the first bombardment.

  Hadley could see that the battery had moved from its hill. It was now ominously positioned in a field barely three hundred yards from the western gate. The sanctum would come under heavy fire that day, but there was no sign of enemy sappers just yet. Manning such machines over hours of dangerous labor took its toll, even for orcs.

  “They’ll renew within the hour,” Sandor murmured, reading Hadley’s mind as he so often did. The Governor looked tired and haggard. She wished she could kiss him, but they were in public and appearances were everything.

  “Nothing unexpected so far,” she pointed out. “Whatever foul magic enabled the fall of Duskovy Castle has yet to raise its head here.”

  “Aye,” the Governor said thoughtfully. “One might’ve expected an appearance by now. Perhaps your sister is no longer with the army?”

  Hadley met Sandor’s penetrating gaze. Even now, after thirty hours without sleep, he was as brutally insightful as ever.

  “Or dead,” Hadley countered, immediately blocking her mind to the possibility. Ruminating on her family at a time like this was as good as a deathwish.

  “Bagley,” Sandor said quietly. His right-hand man stepped forward from the shadow he’d been lurking in.

  “Milord?”

  “Send word to the eastern gate. I want a disposition report every fifteen minutes.”

  “Milord.”

  Hadley listened with interest. Sandor Ballist was no general, but as crafty as they came. There was a plan in motion, that much was certain.