by Dylan Doose
In the background, he could hear Randal sobbing. He didn’t let himself listen.
The patient’s fury heightened once again, and this time he was her passion. She slashed out thrice. The third caught Gaige’s arm, shredded his flesh, and spun him around. The next strike opened up his back and sent him sprawling to the ground, nearly splitting his head on a tombstone. He rolled away from a fatal downward strike. For less than a second he looked up into the red sky, and then she was on him, fetid breath blowing hot gusts in his face. He dropped his sword and grabbed the beast by the wrists before it could sink its claws into him.
Her snapping fangs came close. Gaige tilted his head back, then jerked his head forward and rammed the iron beak of his mask into the patient’s throat. She gave a strangled howl. Gaige planted his feet against her solid abdominal wall, and with all his might he kicked her back, blood coughing up from her throat.
Surging to his feet, he began backing toward the cart, toward the still-loaded muskets that lay by the iron casket.
The Lycanthrope understood the threat. She charged. Gaige stepped right to avoid a left claw, but with imperceptible speed the patient twisted back around and razor claws gouged into his right thigh. The sanguinum was piping hot through his veins, and even as he saw the claws cut him he did not feel it. Not yet.
He pressed forward, and with his brass-knuckled fist he struck the golden-haired beast across the mouth. She was stunned, and could not rally to avoid the second blow, a swing with bad intention. The knuckles cracked hard against skull and the blow echoed. She evaded a third strike, stumbling back out of his reach.
Gaige could not feel the pain from his wounds; the sanguinum saw to that. But that claw had scored deep into his right leg, and between that fresh immobilizing wound and his crippled left leg, it was becoming increasingly difficult to stand, chemical enhancements or no.
“Just lie down. Quit,” Gaige growled.
The Lycan’s eyes were a gray blue, glinting with red in Gaige’s vision. Her golden hair swayed in the wind. Gaige could smell her blood; he could smell her defeat. She growled back at the doctor and, close by, the until-then-silent ravens perched on the willow began to caw as if in approval.
She had lost a lot of blood, lost it fast, so her next strike was slow. Gaige was bleeding, but not as badly, and his double dose of sanguinum was reaching its peak.
He evaded a claw, a snap of the teeth, a claw, another, then a wild shoulder charge, the last mistake. Gaige pirouetted to the side then with his wobbling legs rooted as best they could, the doctor twisted through his core and hammered the Lycan in the ribs with a dropping blow.
She sprawled on the ground fighting for air. She half snapped, half licked at the air, hoping that something in it would grant it the energy to fight on. Gaige could see in the defeated eyes of the cursed that nothing was to be found. Sorcery had lost, to a mortal man and his medicine, and his science.
Gaige let out a shrill caw, the sound of some terrible, predatory black bird, and grabbed hold of the mane of hair and began wrestling the patient to the cart. She was heavy, the ground was muddy, and their fight had made it more slippery still. Gaige fell and the Lycan took the opportunity to try and crawl away.
“Oh no you don’t. This is for your own good,” Gaige said through heavy breaths as he wearily pulled himself back to his feet using a gravestone for support. He stumbled back to the patient. She snapped at him when he reached out to again try and drag her to the surgery table. A final administration of brass fist served as the needed dose of anesthesia.
“Randal? Are you alive?”
A piteous moan was the only reply.
“Stay that way!” He couldn’t go to him. Not yet. He had a patient to cure, a task to finish. He must see this to the end.
In the distance, the things of the graves were rising, roused by the bloodshed and the whimpers of a dying man grinding through the foggy sky along with the doctor’s grunts of reckless effort and the snarling of the golden-haired Lycanthrope. They would be having a feeding frenzy if Gaige did not hurry.
Randal groaned. Somewhere beneath the raging blood that boiled from the sanguinum, somewhere in his mind, there was a young Gaige De’Brouillard. This younger, calm-blooded self wept for Randal, and he yelled at the current Gaige, “Help him, you bastard!”
Gaige reached down and grabbed the patient by her golden ankles above razor-clawed feet, and he dragged her the rest of the way to the cart. If he was fast enough he could still save both. He had to be fast enough. He focused his gaze, chin over his shoulder, on Fredrick the Fearless that stern mule, easily grazing there by the road amongst the torrent of violence that had just befallen the earth around him.
“Doctor!” Randal whimpered, the sound turning Gaige’s heated blood to ice.
“Don’t yell, Randal. Just shut up. Listen to the sounds of the night, the music of the graves.” Be silent. Be still. Sleep before the ghouls find you.
Gaige tripped up his step, forcing him to look away from the donkey and back at the ground in front of him. Deep crimson streaks of blood were swathed across the dirt from where their struggle had ended, and it just became the doctor’s struggle.
Gaige tossed the remaining four muskets off the back of the cart and, despite it costing him a good squirt of his own blood shooting out of that cruel leg wound, heaved the patient into the cart, then himself.
Don’t let him die.
Gaige winced.
The patient has priority. Randal knew this.
Did he? Did he really?
Gaige opened the iron casket in the back of the cart, then stuffed the patient inside, quickly arranging her into anatomical position. She was losing body mass rapidly. She was dying, and so was the disease. Her hair-fur was shedding off the body. As her snout shrank away, her doglike teeth fell away too. He punched down hard on the lever at the base of the iron casket and it sprang up to the height of an operating table for the doctor when he got to his feet.
He opened his bag of tools and medicines that were already at the foot of the seven-foot casket.
The first thing he took note of was the single loaded syringe of purple liquid that was moon’s widow. There was only one left, because Gaige had been known to use them on the wrong occasions, creating hard choices for himself in situations much like the one he was in currently.
He decided, ultimately, that he needed it more. He couldn’t save anyone if he bled out here on his feet. He ripped away the fabric of his already torn sleeve and tied it around his thigh to slow the bleeding—his veins were already bulging from the struggle and the sanguinum, so it was of little difficulty for him to find a vein.
The pump went down and the purple liquid oozed into him. The red mood that had been hanging over the world dissipated.
Indigo-blue and violet hues streamed through space. The doctor’s hands became steady. Despite the sounds of the dreaded things lurking in the close beyond, his soul was at ease.
The patient was fading as quickly as the disease. Death would take them both free of discrimination. The doctor grabbed a vial—silver dust with Lupus-bane and human blood comingled inside—and then a long needle. Gaige opened the vial and pulled the iron plunger of the syringe up. It filled, too slowly.
The patient writhed side to side in her death throes. She was human now, a blonde young woman, of prime athletic anatomy, an overdeveloped deltoid on the pulling arm suggesting… the practice of a bow, perhaps? Masterful practice, by the looks.
Who are you to the lord regent?
“This is going to hurt, then the beast will be gone for good,” he said.
He pressed his left forearm across her chest, leaning his weight on her to still her struggles as best he could, and brought his hand down to stab the long needle into her heart. The Lycanthrope within screamed out one last time, the sound a devil makes as it gets sucked back into the fire. Beneath his black bird’s mask, Gaige smiled at the sound. The smile faded as he heard a horrific sucking gurgle from be
hind, the sound of a throat being ripped open by a ghoul.
He thought of nothing but the patient before him. He reminded himself that the lord regent had ordered Briggs to stress a single thing.
“The patient must live,” Briggs had said.
“Or no reward?” Gaige had asked, cynical.
“The patient must live, doctor,” Briggs had said again, his glowing blue eyes peering from just below the brim of his hat. “The stakes are greater than you know. It is not your life, or hers, or mine, or even the lord regent’s at risk. She must live.”
The doctor worked alone, not letting himself think of Randal’s loss, maintaining speed. Burning was faster than stitching, and so he set to that quickly, using his oil torch, an iron canister that pumped oil by the pressure applied via a trigger below the nozzle. The oil then sprayed a mist into a match lit before it. The result was a thin, powerful blast of flame. Gaige applied its heat to metal instruments and sealed up all the patient’s leaks. Her mouth opened and every muscle in her neck tensed like it would rip, but she did not have the force to scream, so she did so silently.
When it was done, Gaige slammed shut the lid of the iron casket and stomped the pedal of the mechanism on the floor of the cart, and the casket dropped back down to foot level.
Gaige looked out into the graves and the blanket of mist. Not fifteen feet away, Randal lay dead, his guts out on display as he was consumed by the first of the ghouls. The doctor had not realized how close they had gotten. And all around he was beginning to see their silhouettes form in the fog.
It was too late to do anything now. It did not matter that it hurt to see it; it did not matter that he wanted to run at the cursed beings and cut them with his cane. Because he could gut ten of them, he could be drenched in their blood, rancid, sick red droplets beading and falling off the tip of his beak, but the next ten would be there before the first ten lost their hearts or heads, and he would die. And so the patient would die locked in her iron casket.
So he stepped over from the back of the cart into the front and sat down, and he lifted and cracked Fredrick’s reins.
“Come, Fredrick, before we are overwhelmed,” Gaige said to the donkey, then cracked the reins again. The mutant steed’s muscles burst into gear and they were off, as fast as Fredrick could go.
He thought only of the address now, the estate in the country—Coldcreek Manor—the place where he had been instructed to meet the lord regent, and to bring the patient for further care and recovery. He thought it funny, for as a young man, despite his parents’ and doctors’ warnings, he used to go for long country rides. The point he would always reach was Coldcreek Manor, and he would sit at the top of the hill and look down to the sheltered valley where the house stood, white brick catching the sun. It had looked like an architectural cross between a Brynthian fortress, with a solid central structure, and a Fracian villa, with sloped roofs that stretched out over the luxurious balconies with banisters of white stone. He had loved that house in the first half of his life. It had been a dream, a fantasy, a perfect jewel set among manicured lawns and bright flowers. A place that didn’t belong in this dark world.
Years later he had heard the rumors that the house had been built over top of catacombs, vast underground burial chambers of an ancient race that had housed both the living and the dead beneath the earth.
Gaige had not gone for many years.
Hours and many miles had passed when for a moment he dozed off, the drugs wearing off and exhaustion taking hold. He jerked awake and thought Randal was beside him. He extended the reins for the young man to take.
But Randal was dead.
Guilt whipped at Gaige’s soul. He opened a box where he stored all his regrets and shame, and he added this to the overflowing contents.
The outcome of this night was not the storybook ending he would never admit he had secretly hoped for. He hoped for it every time. But that was not something a man versed in reality said; not out loud, anyway. So he swallowed that taste of disappointment that he knew better than anything, and he reminded himself that while a young man had died a painful, but relatively quick death, a young woman was saved. So, in some sense a scale was balanced and all was fair, all was natural.
But the heaviness in his limbs, the numb tingling in his fingers, and the weight on his heart that threatened to crush it were not natural. They were all sequelae of the drugs, worse than he had ever experienced before. He wondered if he would survive them.
It was another hour before he reached the hill on the road that looking down on the valley at Coldcreek. It was as he remembered, bold and light in the dark green country and forest. A blue river ran just beyond, and Gaige was surprised that he only remembered the river again now. There was the sound of flapping wings, and ravens—ones of the same size as those on the tree in the graves—flew overhead, past him. They took their perch on Coldcreek’s balcony, and they stared out at Gaige, up the hill.
A vise constricted around his heart. Pain lanced his left shoulder and arm.
He stared back at the birds, and they were the last things he recalled before the effects of his drugs finally wore off completely. Exhaustion set in to the fullest. His lids drifted shut. He jerked them open, and realized he was slumped over, his cheek against the wooden seat.
Again, his lids drifted down. Against his will they were closing. So close to his destination he could not fight off sleep. The pressure on his heart was unbearable, the pain radiating down his left arm and up his neck even worse.
He could feel each beat of his heart, his pulse stuttering.
And he knew fear that he would not live to see the beyond the lord regent had promised.
* * *
Since the dawn of man there have been sorcerers and their beasts, in every corner of every cave, in the depths of the sea, waiting to rise one terrible night beneath the moon and walk upon solid earth. They dwelt in the forests, and the mountains, and for thousands of years they dominated us, brutalized and fed upon us. Man went below the surface, hid away, and strengthened himself so that one day he could return to the light on the surface. Return and unleash his vengeance on those dreadful things he had cowered from in terror for so long. It is up to us, as the men and women of today, to do what the old ones did, the ones who came out from the caverns and pushed the fiends aside to make way for the age of man. The greatest age.
-Dante Varron, the first seeker
* * *
Chapter Five
Dreams of Beyond
The doctor’s eyes opened. A hard surface pressed against his back, or perhaps he pressed against the surface. A drowsy orange light stung his pupils. He blinked and blinked again. His mouth tasted like he’d licked a ghoul’s foot.
Randal was dead.
The girl was alive.
At least, she had been last he looked.
The drowsy glow came from the chandelier above. He was sitting at the head of a long, empty dining table, upright, as if he had been in the middle of meal. Across the table at the opposite end sat a broad-shouldered man. His straight, dark hair was swept back from his forehead and fell to his shoulders. His fair skin was a contrast to his dark hair. He wore a red coat embroidered with the symbols of ravens on one half and wolves on the other.
“Lord regent,” Gaige croaked.
“Ah, doctor, you’re back.” He was very still, his eyes dark and fathomless. “I guess it worked. At times I impress even myself.” The lord regent smiled.
“I must have passed out,” Gaige said. “You found her? She is stable?”
At this the lord regent began to laugh.
“You truly are impressive, doctor. Tell me, how do you feel?”
Gaige didn’t trust the lord regent’s good humor. He sincerely questioned why he had just awoken upright at an empty dining table. Gingerly, he shifted on the chair. He should have been feeling a hellish throb in his chest, another in his ruined leg, and a third in his injured good leg. The absence of agony was unsettling.
“You died, doctor,” said the lord regent, still smiling.
“I died?” Gaige’s heart rate began to increase… Or at least it should have with his rising anger. But it didn’t. Gaige put his hand to his chest.
He could feel nothing. Not just an absence of pain, but an absence of his pulse.
He put his hand to his neck, to the carotid pulse. Nothing.
“What’s happening?” Gaige stood, and although there was no pain he did so slowly, with an immense stiffness, as if he had not risen for days.
“By the time I got to you, doctor, you had been dead already for nearly ten minutes. No alchemy for that, I’m afraid.” The lord regent stood from his chair.
Gaige took a deep breath. It wasn’t the first time vile dreams had haunted his rest after he self-administered the drugs.
“You aren’t dreaming,” the lord regent said as he crossed the vast dining room and exited through a doorway at the back. “Come along.”
Curious, Gaige followed. He walked, stiff-limbed and creaking, feeling like a ghoul with his shuffling gait. After a few steps he began to gain some pace as the stiffness eased.
“If I was dead, how am I alive?” Gaige snarled at the red-coated man’s back.
The lord regent turned around.
“I don’t have time for the long version, so I’ll give you the short one. You died. I did not expect you to die. Right outside the point of your quest’s completion, no less. I was hoping you would return with her, you would stay here to recover from your wounds, and I would be able to explain what comes next. However, your addictions—”