by Dylan Doose
Another officer barked an order in Romarian, and shoulder to shoulder the regiment began to fall back down the street. Ken could make out the city center now past the heads and pike shafts of his deliverers. The white stone was not yet drenched red. Empty pyres were set, unlit.
The mob of festive Enlightened had dispersed. Most of them likely had been sent to the northern part of the city, where they would hide until they were caught like the mother and her child, or the old lady ripped apart by the tentacled abomination.
Will they all turn into those things? Ken wondered, and turned back a moment to get a glimpse of Chevic.
The golden knight on the stallion had lost his lance and had his sword free now, hacking at the hands and tendrils of the moaning flesh creatures that were then pulling him and his horse to the ground.
“Kill the demon, hunter! Kill the dem—” The knight was smothered by the parody of living things his brothers had become.
Ken slipped his axe into his belt and watched as Chevic’s skinless, lipless face rose up like a snake head behind the golden knight. Three naked men and a woman plunged their knives over and over into the knight’s horse as it screamed.
Chevic’s demonic arm formed from his own guts grasped the knight’s head, and he screamed along with his horse as his helmet caved and his skull burst inside.
A spearhead at the end of a long pike lunged past the two lines of men in front of Ken. He tried to get out of the way but was closed in by his temporary allies too tightly on either side. He grabbed the shaft just before the point stuck him in the shoulder and widened his stance, then smashed the men at his sides, with his elbows forcing space as he pulled the bone-masked enemy on the other end of the pike into their line.
The pagan was stuck through a good six times before Ken was close enough to throw a swing with his iron fist. The blow skimmed the bronze mask of one of the infantry, snapping the buckles and knocking it clean off the man’s face before the strike met its true mark and sent bloody fragments of human and beast skull alike in all directions, where the gore was lost in the bog of carnage.
The clamor of the battle was nearly deafening. Hundreds of blades and cudgels, hacking and smashing, men, women, and whatever the fuck you wanted to call the other elements of the disaster screamed and moaned, bleated and squawked as they fought and died, only to rise as a bloody aberration to fight and die again.
Despite the volume of the combat in the street, Ken heard the high-pitched hum that he recognized as the lightning pillars charging to fire their bolts. He didn’t have the space to sprawl flat on the ground. Hardly had the space to squirm an inch right or left, forward or back. So it’s just luck now, just luck and chaos.
Light flashed.
His ears buzzed like a swarm of locusts was flying round him. He heard nothing else. All he saw was hot white, and he blinked hard.
Silhouettes began to form. He felt for his axe at his belt, pulled it free, and swung out in front of him at the figures as they appeared. No more allies. No more victims. Just fucking ants until I’m back to Theron and the wizard.
His fist made impact with a shadow. Pain shot through his forearm, exploded in his elbow, and radiated all the way to the shoulder. I’ll keep swinging, though.
The shadow dropped. Ken blinked again and his axe found another shadow, this one with horns. His vision was clear enough now to see the blood spray, and his ears got back to doing their job well enough to hear the end of the thing’s death gurgle.
Three more insects swatted, and he was through into the open courtyard of the city center. He ran toward the great white monolith, passing the pyres. The black clouds ripped open in a giant void above the sun tower and an unending stream of lightning surged through the center of it, casting a yellow glow on the swirling walls of darkness in the sky. The orbs that lined the buttresses of the Basilica all began to glow and hum just as the ones on the pillars had in the street, but when the force was unleashed, all the bolts converged into a single holy spear of the Patriarch’s power that warped over and past Ken into the battle on the southern street.
This time, when Ken’s hearing and sight returned, the clamor of battle did not. The first wave was no more. The infantrymen were no more. The houses that lined the thoroughfare were no more.
There was nothing but dust and the river of blood, and the monstrous creatures were smeared into a bubbling red tar that didn’t re-form into writhing faces.
There was something to that. He just didn’t know what.
* * *
Oh son, seek not happiness, seek not love, seek not joy. For the promise of warmth is but a frozen lie.
Don’t be afeared, oh son. Not of the cold and the hunger, not of the axes of your foemen. Fear not a sky filled with arrows, or storming rains of blood. They are the truth; they are honesty; they are reality.
Seek no peace. Not your own and not your neighbors. Seek only heads; seek only crowns; seek only vengeance, fame, and death.
Oh son, you are the north, you are the blood of Bodan, and this is our way.
—The Sagas
* * *
Chapter Sixteen
Out of the Frying Pan
Dalia stared , unable to close her eyes, paralyzed by pain and fear as she watched the demon’s claw dripping with bloody afterbirth emerge into the world from inside of her. She was as good as dead. Together, the demon she had birthed and the wizard she had just drained of nearly all his power and all his life had seen to that.
She wanted so desperately to look away from her mangled leg, nearly cut in half, look away from her abdomen where it was torn asunder. She wanted to deny the truth of what she saw.
She would not see the Patriarch die. She would not witness her promised revenge.
Dammar had lied to her.
The muscles of her abdomen convulsed once more. They tore, and the bones in her hips shattered as the emerging demon grew.
By the time it pulled itself over to the convulsing body of the sweet wizard—Aldous—Dammar was the size of a fully grown man. His hundreds of pink eyes darted around the wine cellar as he turned his stag head back to look at her. His black antlers grew and grew, the shadows cast by the candlelight appearing like dead branches on the walls.
“Do not worry, daughter…Mother,” the demon said with a grin. “Death comes to you, but death you will still become.”
Prophecies and promises, and they all meant nothing. She had been a dupe, a pawn, a fool…again and again. Rage rose in her like a tide.
The demon smirked and turned away from her. As eight more arms grew from his back, he delicately stroked a finger across the wizard’s face, then, on the very tip of his claw, he lifted and examined the red gem around Aldous’s neck.
“Where did you get this…Father?” Dammar asked the unconscious body beneath him. “Did you know her? Is she back? Or is it coincidence that this jewel hangs around your neck? Such a small world, this world of yours, after all. But it’s no matter, not tonight—tonight we celebrate the pyres.” Dammar let the gemstone fall back to the wizard’s chest, and then, still growing in size so that he had to lean over and crawl with his many hands upon the ground, he scuttled from the cellar. He sought the chapel. There he would carry out the carnage that had been promised as Dalia’s vengeance.
“Liar!” she tried to scream after him, but no sound came.
All sensation below the waist was gone, and she was becoming increasingly cold as she dragged herself toward the wall, away from the twitching wizard. She would die alone now. Die without her vengeance. Die in this cellar like a wounded animal.
She left a grotesque trail of dark blood. That blood is mine. I am that blood, black ichor that runs through me, the blood of the soulless.
Her back thudded against stone. She closed her eyes and let her head fall back. And in that moment, she remembered. She knew.
Dammar. Demon. Liar. God of change and transformation.
Indeed, he had transformed her into the vessel he needed for
his rebirth.
She was Dalia.
But before Dalia, she had been Dammar, the dark-haired boy named by his mother for an ancient god. The dark-haired boy whose father was the Patriarch. The dark-haired boy who had watched his love burn.
“I’m sorry, Selkirk. I’m sorry for all of it,” she whispered, and she could see him there in the wine cellar, smiling at her, the candlelight accentuating every curve of his perfect face.
“It’s all right,” he said. “We can be together now. The fight is over. Your war has ended.”
She wanted to tell him her war was not over. She wanted to tell him she had a new quest for vengeance, this time against a demon instead of a man who called himself a god. She wanted to say so much more.
Instead, Dalia closed her eyes.
Theron twirled his heavy sword , four and a half feet and seven pounds of fine steel. No magic, no tricks, no traps. Just that perfect piece of steel. That was all he needed.
I will kill you, demon.
Ahead of him, the sad knight’s blood phantom scurried down the eastern corridor toward the chapel, leaving a red, wet trail next to the silver-furred ape’s bloody path of footprints.
A terrible tumult carried from the chapel, cries and pleas and the thunder of many feet. The symphony of Dammar’s vengeance had begun. Theron could not see the demon yet, but he watched as the guests ran in all directions, looking to hide or escape into the streets. Soldiers formed lines, shields and spears embellished with gold and bronze.
His heart pounded like a smith’s hammer on an anvil, and the vibrations made his aching head want to burst. He could feel the blood squeezing through his veins in his temples, pressing hard against the inside of his helmet.
“It is my destiny. I will kill you.” He said it over and over, and his steps got quicker and quicker.
“Go, then, you damn fool.” It was the voice of Jarl Therick.
Another hallucination.
The red-bearded, barrel-chested northman stepped out in front of him.
“You are no more real than my mother or my father or my dead sister,” Theron said as he stared at his old friend, his adopted father, the man he had betrayed. A hallucination.
What was through the threshold though was no hallucination.
Theron shouldered past the Jarl.
In the center of the chapel stood the mightiest foe Theron had ever faced. The god of change, the god of destruction, the forest god made flesh. Dammar had manifested. Two stories in height, a hulking mass of black-furred muscle with the legs and hooves of a stag and ten sickeningly long arms with razor-clawed hands at the ends. His head was that of a stag with massive pronged antlers that, along with the rest of the thing’s skull, were covered in lidless, festering pink eyes that darted in all directions, surveying his victims.
Balls of abyss-black fire formed in his hands before he hurled them into the crowd of Brasov’s nobles and foreign envoys. When the black voids hit their targets, the victims were sucked into the darkness and then the voids sealed, only to reopen and hurl them back out with immense speed so they hung for an instant just below the chapel’s painted ceiling. Then the instant passed and they crashed to the stone floor below, where their flesh and muscle splattered to mist as bones shattered to dust.
Theron held his place at the threshold and took stock, evaluating his line of approach. He saw no sign of either Ken or Aldous, but he did not let himself consider what that might mean.
The silver ape Theron had battled below charged a group of Golden Sons as they loosed arrow after arrow at him. He covered his face with his massive forearms until he was upon them, barreling into the first one, sending him sprawling. Then he slit open the bellies of two more with his crescent knives.
A large host of fully armored golden knights, all with smiling helms and great white plumes of horse hair, tower shields and winged spears in hand, entered the chapel from the closest of the three western corridors. They advanced toward Dammar, ushering the survivors behind their shield wall.
Of the Patriarch there was no sign.
The hallucination of Therick had followed Theron and stood now at his shoulder. It began to laugh.
“Is that regret I see on your face, boy?” Therick said. “Regret that you didn’t keep your oath to me and my kin? You were going to be a prince!” Therick roared the last words, and Theron turned to look the hallucination in the eyes, his lip twitching with rage.
“I gave you no oath to do what you asked of me,” Theron said.
Therick burst into another fit of laughter. “You think that what you are doing here is righteous? That you live by the precepts in your stupid book? You think it matters, that you can make a difference? This is no more a moral life than the one you walked out on. This one just has less responsibility.”
“It is righteous, what I’m doing here. It is righteous.” Theron banged the side of his fist against his helmet, trying to dispel the hallucination. He was no stranger to conks on the head. He knew what was causing this, and he knew this could not be the moment he was weak. “Now begone, specter.”
The lord and lady from the Dragon Dynasty who had looked on Theron with disgust when they entered the Basilica under an hour ago backed away from Dammar, the woman shielding the man behind her. He skewered them both with the long claws of a single hand and held the thrashing, screaming bodies above his open mouth, blood cascading over his blackened, rotted fangs. He shook his head, his long ears flopping, spraying droplets of blood onto the chapel walls.
Therick stepped in front of Theron again. His left eye squinted, the pupil of which split through the center of his frozen blue iris like a serpent’s. His expression changed, no longer one of spiteful contempt, but one of understanding and love. Then the northman stepped forward, grabbed Theron by the horns of his helmet, pulled him closer, and pressed his forehead against Theron’s. Although Theron knew for certain the man was not there, he could feel his presence. He could feel the grip on his helmet. He could see the fine details of the blue dragon tattoos that marked the sides of Therick’s shaved skull.
One of which the man did not have when Theron last saw him.
“Do what you must, but don’t die.” Therick thudded his head hard into Theron’s, and then he was gone, leaving the words “Keep your helmet on” in the air.
Theron thought of the old sagas of the northmen, the axe hall where all warriors go after death to feast, battle, die, and live again for all eternity. All one had to do to get there was die well, die fighting, killing. Just as Chayse had.
Theron lifted his eyes, and across the room he saw a familiar face. The man was covered in gore head to toe, as if he had just swum through a river of it. Stringy strands of once living tissue clung to his leather armor. But there was no mistaking the brutish size, the posture, the beady, shifting eyes peering out from a skull like an anvil.
Kendrick the Cold. The bone fragment of the Emerald Witch gleamed white in his crimson-drenched beard. He looked as he always did, cold and ready to fight.
And a more welcome sight Theron could not have imagined. The only thing that would have made it better would have been Aldous by his side.
“Kendrick!” Theron yelled, and raised his sword high.
“Theron!” Ken yelled back, and raised his bloodied iron fist into the air.
If there was ever a time that Ken was glad he knew a man with such fanatical devotion to getting himself flayed alive by all things larger and with more teeth than him, it was then. Because the only thing Theron was more devoted to than getting himself killed was killing anything and everything that fit the category of monster. Right now there were a lot of those.
“I see Dammar. Where is the Patriarch?” Theron bellowed.
“Sun tower, working his spells,” Ken roared back. “Where’s the lad?”
Theron’s reply was lost to him as blood sprayed into his open mouth and he turned, searching for the source, to find a hulking, silver-furred ape slicing open the last throat of the
group of Chevic’s Golden Sons. Their arrows protruded from the brute like the quills of a porcupine.
The ape stumbled forward, dragging its feet toward Ken. Its shoulders heaved up and down with each breath.
He is stronger than the others, but he is wounded, almost done. Disable his hands first, hack the tendons, then end him.
Ken began to circle the ape. Dammar was chewing his way through Romaria’s noble family bloodlines and droves of foreign emissaries like he had been waiting a damn long time to do it. The demon’s antlers raked down soldiers, and his claws opened throats and split people in two like pieces of tinder.
Theron sprinted across the chapel floor, trying to reach Ken, pushing his way through those who were trying to run toward the eastern corridor and out into the city streets.
Good luck with that.
The hunter was closing on the ape’s flank as Ken continued to circle just out of reach. Sensing Theron, the ape turned in time to bring his crescent moon knives to catch the slash of Theron’s claymore. The blow had so much force that it sent the brute stumbling. That was Ken’s chance. He lunged forward, axe above his head.
Something wrapped round his waist.
Dammit.
He was thrown down, his back hitting the tile hard. The air in his lungs came exploding out, and his ribs suffered a jolt of pain.
A moaning Golden Son, his throat slit to the spine, reached for Ken’s throat. With a quick twist of his hips, Ken rolled on top of the reanimated corpse and frantically punched and hacked the thing’s face into ooze. Still the arms twitched. The pulverized head formed into a sort of slug and began sliding across the floor toward Dammar. Ken struggled to his feet, whirling around to return his focus to the silver ape that was clashing with Theron. One monster at a time.
Unfortunately, there was now a new monster between him and the hunter: a centipede made from the twisted, elongated organs of the dead, with hundreds of legs formed of coagulated blood. It came slithering and twisting forward. Ken’s axe cut through the thing’s body like butter, and when his iron fist met the hideous red face it was soft as a cushion.