by Dylan Doose
As soon as the axe cut through the creature, it healed and kept coming, skittering forward. When Ken retracted his iron fist, the face re-formed. His axe and fist were of very little use against this powerful magic.
The bubbling red tar on the southern street after the lightning of the orbs had zapped it. The tar had not re-formed into phantoms of blood.
Ken had noted the fact then, and it came back to him now.
“Where’s the wizard?” Ken yelled to Theron as he hacked the centipede in half once again when it twisted around him. Again the phantom re-formed. “We need his fire.”
Aldous…Aldous, wake up.
It was a child’s voice, carried on a cool breeze.
Aldous opened his eyes.
Aldous…wake…up. The voice swept through the air, a whisper on the wind through the branches of dead trees all around him. The sky was an endless heavy blanket of red clouds. Distant thunder rumbled as he sat up and then got to his feet.
A hooded child stood before him, dressed in a fine black cloak. Embroidered across the front of the garment in red thread by a true artisan was the intricately woven design of a great pack of wolves running and gnashing their teeth.
Where is this? Where are we?
He reached out, and the child turned and ran into the wood of dead trees, fallen red leaves crunching underfoot. Another gust of wind blew at Aldous’s back, and with it another voice. A familiar voice.
A woman’s voice.
Not Chayse. A different voice. One that had reached out to him at Dentin.
Go, Aldous, into the woods ’neath the red sky. Your destiny awaits.
He did not know why, but the words hit him like a spell. His teeth began to chatter. His stomach turned with violent hunger, his legs wobbled, but he began to run, gathering speed with each step, into the trees after the child.
The back of the cloak was embroidered with a whirling crimson thread storm of ravens.
You must drink from the sacrifice, and you must let these wounds heal you. Heal you of your weakness.
They came to a steep hill, thick with dead trees split by lightning, sharp sticks stabbing out from the ground. The child nimbly leapt and hopped, evading all on his way down the hill, unharmed by the hazards.
Do not fear the pain, do not fear the agony, for it is only beginning, dear Aldous Weaver, savior of my son. For all of you, it is only just beginning.
On numb, wobbling legs, Aldous charged down the hill. His foot caught and his stomach sank as the fall began. He kept his eyes open. Something inside him insisted he watch. So he watched, catching glimpses of red leaves flying into the red sky, flashing, fleeting sights of his hand and wrist first breaking then flopping and smacking until bone tore through skin. He saw the strands of his black hair get confused with black branches. The world spun around and around as he plummeted down that slope in this twisted realm.
Agony consumed him, became him, and there was nothing but a sea of pain.
The fall stopped.
He stared in abject horror down at his belly, where a thick spike of wood worked its way right through his guts. He could not scream, could not wail, could not think.
In front of him, the woods ended. In his fading vision he saw a single dead tree, a massive ash in a field of mud. The black-cloaked child knelt before it and hunched to drink from a crimson pool at the roots, a pool formed from the blood that ran down the trunk.
Nailed through the wrists and feet to the tree was Kendrick the Cold, his eyes wide, his jaw clenched so tightly it was likely to burst his teeth. Aldous reached a mangled hand out to his friend; tears dripped down his chin and fell onto the spike, mingling with his blood.
Above Kendrick was Theron Ward, his feet kicking frantically, his hands bound, swaying back and forth on a rope hanging from a high branch. Blood oozed from his eye and his scarred socket burst open. His intestines protruded from the three mortal claw wounds to his abdomen.
On the tree’s highest branch was a headless man in a red cloak with the black embroideries of wolves and ravens. In his hands he held his head. He looked much like Aldous’s father. But Aldous knew the man holding his own head was not his father—it was Aldous himself.
Your pain will seem endless. Your suffering eternal. You will come to wish for death, again and again. You will pray for it, you will worship death, and when it finally comes, know this, Aldous Weaver: it will not be the end.
Something grabbed him and he was being pulled from the spike. He watched as a slick trail of his blood was left behind. And then he was free of it, flat on his back, sobbing.
With a terrible longing he stared up at the one who had pulled him free. He reached for her, but without looking down, Chayse flew upward on black wings into red clouds as they rumbled with thunder. They parted, making way for the dark angel of the hunt. He watched until he could see her no more.
A silver moon peered down, and beneath it Aldous began to howl. His flesh stretched and his bones cracked and grew into new shapes and forms. His teeth exploded from his mouth; in their place grew rows of fangs. His face lengthened into a snout and his blood began to boil and steam on the ground before him, and then in an instant the agony faded and only the fire remained.
The flaming wolf walked to the sacrificial tree, tilted his head to the crimson pool, and began to drink.
* * *
“A blessing?” Lady Weaver asked. Her sobbing halted, but her voice still wavered. “From the Luminescent?”
“No, no certainly not,” Diana Ward said, but her smile did not wane in the least. “He is blessed by the old gods. The ones that are soon to return.”
Lady Weaver broke down again, unable to contain the roiling emotions within. The guilt and the fear of having a sorcerer as an infant son was heavy indeed.
“The old gods, Diana?” It was Darcy Weaver who spoke now, and even his voice began to tremble, for Diana Ward was an unsettling woman, even if one called her friend. And her words were more unsettling still.
“I have cast a spell. His power will be dormant.” Diana shot a look at Lady Weaver. “You need not worry that he will incinerate you as you nurse him. He will be like any other boy.” She pulled on her black coat and went to the door at a leisurely pace, speaking as she went. “I can’t say for how long the power in him will sleep…it will hunger and it will rise. A decade off at the very least. Perhaps two.” She opened the door to leave the room.
“What then? What happens then?” Darcy asked.
“Then, Darcy? Aldous will join the fight against those terrible things, those wicked things that drag the innocent screaming into the night. Aldous will do as I do. He will hunt.”
* * *
Chapter Seventeen
Into the Fire
Aldous opened his eyes . He was on his hands and knees, his face lowered to the ground. With every bit of blood he lapped up from the floor, his pain diminished. He could feel the forces rising. He could feel the fire burning.
Drink it up, he told himself, even as the horror of what he was doing registered in his mind.
He retched, but forced the fetid drink back down. After a moment, he got to his feet. I am alive. An outcome he had not expected.
He looked at Dalia’s naked corpse. She was ripped open to the navel.
He had been drinking a demon’s afterbirth.
He retched again. This time it came back up, a congealed sludge. He fell back to his knees, the pain of his injuries returning.
Screams carried to him from the chapel above. Screams, and Dammar’s laughter.
Drink…drink of this demonic sacrifice and save my son, said the disembodied voice of Diana Ward. And Aldous crawled forward and drank.
Theron’s arms rang from wrist to shoulder as his blade crashed against the ape’s defense. The creature’s flesh was a hundred times pierced, arrows sticking from him in all directions, sword and spear cuts marking every few inches of silver fur with bloody lines and crosses.
Behind the ape, Kendrick hack
ed his way free for the third time from the ensnarement of the centipede-like blood phantom that had earlier been the sad knight guarding the treasury door.
Theron pulled back his sword, lifting it high as if he were about to strike, but he held it an instant, coaxing the ape to lash out.
It takes the bait.
The crescent moon knives curved in for Theron’s throat. He was standing light on his toes, his muscles tensed in his legs, and he lunged backward and to his left. The ape came forward just as Theron evaded the attack that would have otherwise taken off his head. They were aligned shoulder to shoulder, facing in opposing directions. This Theron had anticipated; the ape had not.
I am the hunter.
With all his might and weight behind the sweeping slash, Theron swung his claymore into the ape’s spine. It severed with a satisfying mixture of crunching and snapping, the way the trunk of a sapling might when hacked with equivalent force. The follow-through saw the blade lodged halfway through the creature’s immensely thick abdominal wall.
“Your master dies next!” Theron roared as he pressed forward with all the strength in his arms and his hip against his sword’s pommel until the blade ran the beast through to the hilt. The ape collapsed to its knees, its crescent knives clattering to the bloody white stone, its head slumped forward. Even when Theron pulled his sword from the wound, the ape remained in the that position: kneeling, as if in prayer, hacked through and scored with a hundred arrows before its beast god as it relished in the slaughter of the Enlightened.
Someone, or something, thudded into Theron’s back. He whirled around with a growl, but halted his blade, for it was Ken who had backed into him. The dead Enlightened rose all around them. The phantoms came forth in all manner of grotesque forms, organs and bones twisted and braided together to conceive new limbs. Coagulated blood turned bodies long, like serpents or monstrous grubs or worms. Others had hands formed to bloody bone pincers and claws. They ripped the flesh from their own faces and moaned in unison.
The drums that had echoed far off were close now, as close as the screams of the golden soldiers dying within the chapel and in the courtyard without.
The sound of the chime that had lingered as the storm began halted.
A ritual curse, cast by a greater celestial demon on an entire city. He had read of such things. And would have preferred for that knowledge to remain theoretical. There was no preventing this. This is the destiny of Brasov.
“The wizard, Theron! Where’s the boy?” Ken yelled as he sidestepped the snap of a skinless bone pincer and hacked it off at the wrist with his axe. The thing grew back in less time than it took Theron to draw breath.
“I know not.” And that lack of knowledge dismayed Theron. He stepped in and cleaved the phantom’s skull in two just above the nose. The moment it hit the ground and its brains splattered out of its head, it was already beginning to re-form into something else. “His charge was the chapel. He should have had this place in an infernal blaze the moment he saw that…” Theron looked over his shoulder at Dammar, who was battering back the shield wall of golden spearmen with his claws and that dreadful spell, tossing them through portals, causing them to rain down from the chapel ceiling. Their armor crumpled on impact and their bodies burst, only to re-form and join Dammar in the butchery of their own kin.
“He is dead, then,” Ken said, his voice hollow.
Theron’s stomach turned, and he screamed as he cut another of the cursed apparitions in two while it slithered forward.
“He’s not dead. Don’t you damn well say that.”
Ken was likely right. But Theron would refuse to think that way until he was holding the boy’s corpse in his arms.
Theron’s sword was growing heavier with each sweep of the steel as he and Ken made their way to the hard-pressed line of golden spearmen. He swung the blade in wide arcs to keep the phantoms at bay. Ken bludgeoned the ones that got too close. They did not voice the strategy; they had simply done enough killing together to understand that when synchronized they were near unstoppable.
Near being the key word.
Every breath came with a sharp pain now; every beat of Theron’s heart pumped too much blood into his throbbing skull, and he was becoming acutely aware of the fact that his face was swelling enough for his helm to have become so tight on his head that his cheek pressed his one eye half closed.
A skinless face, slashing claws of warped, gore-covered bone, came at him. Theron ducked, swung. He was too slow. He hit the phantom, but it was an exchange, for the phantom’s limb struck him in the head.
Darkness.
Light.
The world spun.
Falling.
Stand!
Countless forms closed in, becoming an indecipherable sea of enemies. The golden shield wall went further and further out of reach.
Kendrick watched , helpless, as Theron took the monstrous blow. He had been slowing, and when his blade hacked into the thing before him, the phantom had already smashed its malformed limb of twisted bone and dripping sinew into a thousand pieces against the side of the hunter’s helmet, driving him down, hard, to one knee. Ken hooked his arm under Theron’s and hoisted him to his feet. Theron’s legs wobbled like a newborn foal’s, and he held his sword loose in one hand, the tip of the blade touching the ground. The rest of the phantoms took the opportunity to close the distance. Ken released the hunter and was amazed when he did not again collapse.
Doesn’t matter, though, not anymore. It’s finally done.
Don’t give up, Kendrick the Cold. His silent self-remonstration drove him forward, though the balance was lost. The tides of chaos had overwhelmed them and were pulling them under. A phantom’s skull burst as Ken’s axe came down on it. Lines of ice slashed his ribs and his peripherals caught a glimpse of the claws that cut him, then the lines went hot and wet as the blood began to flow.
I suppose I deserve it for all I have done. But what of Theron? What of Aldous? They did not deserve this.
He couldn’t think his way out of this. Couldn’t even fight his way out of it, for his enemy did not stay dead. Theron was pressed to Ken shoulder to shoulder. They needed Aldous and they needed him now.
Ken’s iron fist extended. His vision went red, hot blood spraying into his eyes. Something stabbed into his right shoulder. With frantic swipes he battered at the fiends as he tried to blink the blood from his eyes.
Something bit into his leg. Something else bit into his forearm as he clobbered the thing on his leg.
Eaten alive in this house of the Luminescent. After all the blood I shed in his name, I really do suppose I deserve this.
Behind him echoed the sound of Dammar’s laughter, a sound like rolling thunder. A god’s laughter—that had the power to remind a man he was only mortal.
The blood was clearing from Ken’s eyes, the waves of crimson phantoms again taking form before him, smothering him, eating him. Holding his sword by the hilt and blade with his gauntleted fist as if it were a short spear, he stabbed out, for they were too close now for him to swing into the mass of cursed souls.
“I’m sorry, hunter,” Ken yelled through the agony and the fear. The fear that he could no longer ice over, that he was no longer Kendrick the Cold. Death was nearly here and it was arriving painfully. These fucking things are going to eat us alive. But that was not the root of his fear. The root was that he would die as he was, the man he had been rather than the one he wanted to be. That he would die without doing good.
“It is I who must apologize,” said the hunter. With a roar as mighty as a bear’s, he lunged forward, tucking his great sword beneath his arm like a lance instead of a spear. As he skewered the body of the grub-like phantom directly in front of him, he drew his sister’s short sword free from its scabbard and, with speed that Ken knew was requiring energy the man did not have to spend, Theron gave another roar and twisted his body, ripping his sword free of the phantom. He continued to spin with a sword in each hand, his reach extendin
g with each rotation.
He was that same whirlwind of death that Ken had watched him become at the battle of Dentin.
The phantoms re-formed a few feet in front of Theron as more squirmed forward from behind the ones he cut down. Theron’s black cloak was soaked through; his mail glistened red. His claymore scraped across the ground as his shoulders rose and fell with each labored breath, the short sword dangling loosely in his left hand.
The claws and teeth that bit and ripped at Ken had ceased their assault. He was bleeding badly, but at least everything hurt, and if everything hurt he had enough blood still in him to safely say he was not done just yet. He and the hunter would die together, as friends. Better than I deserve.
“If it has to be this, being killed by these fucking things, I’m glad it’s with you, Ward.” Ken swallowed and on wobbling legs stumbled forward, head tilted, looking through his brow at the harbingers of his death. The cold returned, and it returned just in time for the fire.
A blast of red flame burst from the western corridor closest to the chapel’s front doors, a wall of fire as tall and thick as the hallway it emerged from. It raged into the chapel. It scorched the golden soldiers and the blood phantoms alike. It incinerated the beasts and the horrified guests lying wounded on the floor. Gold armor melted to flesh as they screamed. The fighting in that area of the church halted as living and dead scrambled away from the heat.
And as Ken had anticipated, the phantoms that were scalded did not re-form. They were smears of tar now.
“Hunters!” came the echo of a booming voice, as deep and demonic as Dammar’s, but not his. It came from the same corridor as the flame.
The phantoms surrounding Theron and Ken retreated to Dammar in the wake of the inferno.