by Dylan Doose
“Raise your weapons!” the voice ordered from the corridor, and when Ken heard what sounded to be the flapping of wings, he raised his axe and iron fist. Next to him, Theron raised his swords. Because into the chapel flew on blazing wings the wizard’s Ravens.
Ken grinned, and Theron grinned at Ken, and in unison they said, “He’s alive.”
I am alive.
His trousers were back on, his carved staff was in his hand, and the fire inside was kindled to a blaze and growing still.
He had obeyed the voice that spoke to him in the dead woods under the red clouds. He drank of the sacrifice. His kicked-in knee had warped back into place with agonizing cracks and pops. His swollen face had pushed the dark blood from his pores, leaving him healed. A blistering heat that could burn even him seared shut his open wounds.
When you walk toward the things you fear, lad, right into the storm of dread, there is nothing quite like making it to the other side… Wounded, broken, then healed and still alive. It can become…addictive. Like every time you beat fear down, a part of you craves it again, wants to be touched by the fires of hell once more, to learn from them, to be hardened by them. Just to see how solid we can steel ourselves to become.
Kendrick had said that to Aldous shortly after Theron had returned from hunting down the Emerald Witch. Both Aldous and Ken had seen a dark change in Ward, a change Aldous feared would one day occur within himself, a charring of the soul caused by pilgrimages through hellfire. With all he had been through this night, Aldous had little doubt that that change had begun.
“Speak for yourself, and for Theron, even,” Aldous had said to Ken at the time. “But if I never have to have a fight like Dentin again, I’ll not think myself at all cheated.”
But now he was called upon to fight exactly as he had at Dentin.
As he unleashed another cyclone of fire from his staff down the corridor into the church where the acolytes of the tyrannical gods battled, Aldous felt unstoppable. He stood outside of himself, powerful and sure. And he was careful where he aimed.
Moments ago he had been at the end, and now he was born anew, marching to his true birth as a wizard, born in boiling blood and fire. His host of flaming ravens whirled around him as he summoned them from the staff. When the full unkindness of them materialized from the realms beyond the senses, his mind entered theirs, and through hundreds of eyes he saw. Without fear, without repulsion by the torrential violence, he flew on those hundreds of wings into the chapel to save his friends, to balance out a fight with that great leveler that was his fire.
Dammar’s eyes opened . Dalia’s eyes opened. The demon, the god, the boy, the girl, the victim, the murderer, the tyrant… Who am I?
Hands, covered in blood. Trembling.
Vision hazy, but clear enough to see the things that were crawling and slithering forth in the dark.
Crawling inward.
Slithering inward.
Entering her.
My eyes are open.
She looked down, and in the torchlight of the wine cellar she saw the wound that had killed her, the gaping hole from pubis to sternum that the demon had crawled from. Her attention turned to her nearly hacked-off leg, dangling and bloody, and she remembered the wizard she had tricked into being part of the ritual.
Into the wound that cleaved her torso open, a bloody, skinless tendril reached, and when it touched her flesh, the edges of her wound warped and wrapped the tendril up, melding her to it. From the shadows more foul fronds extended to her, and moaning, skinned human faces peered at her from the edges of the darkness.
The bloody phantoms caressed her wounds.
They healed her.
They became her.
She was…alive. Revenge was still in reach.
Once again, everything had changed.
* * *
Steam flares from the pale horse’s nostrils. The beast’s heart pounds beneath the rider in tandem with his own. The crackling of fire and the screams of the dying fall away as the hooves fracture the thin crusting of ice above wet snow, and the fading yelling is replaced by the shriek of steel leaving the scabbard.
A tired arm raises a shield. It is raised too slow. The rider’s heavy sword swings fast, and it swings through the rim of helm and splits skull and spills brain.
A girl screams. Hot tears are snatched off her face by cold wind as she runs; they scatter in the snow and freeze.
The hunter stops thinking. He listens to the drum of his heart, the thunder of the hooves shattering the ice and pounding the snow, the faint rasp of the running girl’s breathing, the whispering of the wind in his ears as he charges her down.
“You’re a hunter, so hunt.”
He hears the words.
He swings the sword.
He knows regret.
* * *
Chapter Eighteen
Farewell For Now
If Theron said he wasn’t afraid that the two ravens conceived of flame diving toward him were going to kill him, he would have been lying, for all around him the storm of summoned birds burrowed into the skulls of the blood phantoms and the Patriarch’s soldiers, the pagans and the beasts. Ally or enemy, it mattered not. Smiling golden and bronze masks could not stop the magic from finding its way inside. Men screamed just before their heads exploded in mists of boiling blood. The ravens hunted the monks and sisters, the surviving guests and their bodyguards as they tried to escape Dammar and the risen cursed. There was no escape.
Through the chapel’s front arches, the division of soldiers was being pushed back by the pagans who had taken Brasov’s streets. A red mist ascended to the church’s high ceiling, a vaporous crimson cloud that bent and warped round the fiery wings of the ephemeral birds.
Aldous had yelled, “Raise your weapons,” and so Theron did, his claymore and short sword crossed as if to protect his face. He closed his eye a moment before a raven closing in on him reached impact.
Heat erupted by his hands, and the inside of his gauntlets became soggy with a flash sweat, but the temperature was bearable. When he opened his eye, the raven was gone. And his swords were ablaze.
“An enhancement from Aldous! If this is his apology for coming late to the party—” Theron’s words were cut off when a woman exploded directly before him. The lower half of the body, the only half that remained, wore the charred strands of an immaculately woven golden dress.
Why the fuck did she run in this direction?
The ravens had formed a sizable barrier now between Theron and Ken and any threat to their survival, providing he and Kendrick a few moments to catch their breath and clear their vision.
Ken lunged first into the whirlwind, and with the devil’s luck that he had, the ravens did not touch him. They flew dangerously close, but he was untouched.
Or was it luck? Had Aldous’s skill at control improved so much? And if it had, why was there half a woman glowing like an ember by Theron’s feet?
Theron’s stomach turned, but not from the killing and the gore. It turned for he feared the intent behind Aldous’s spell. He thought of the words that Chayse’s ghost had said to him. “Keep telling yourself you’re a good man, brother.”
Would Aldous be able to tell himself he was a good man when this night’s carnage was done?
Ken’s iron fist and the head of his axe were ignited with controlled flames like Theron’s swords, and when he struck his first foe with the new power bestowed him, the malformed apparition of moaning, twisted flesh was destroyed, unable to re-form as it had four times already.
Ken slipped in the mess, dropping his axe and landing hard on his back. Four monstrosities—the one in the lead being the centipede that had once been the sad knight—were sparked into action by seeing Ken fall.
He slid himself backward toward Theron, his axe beyond reach but still alight, turning the oozing gore around it to tar.
The ravens destroyed three of the fiends, thereby thinning both the sea of enemies and the flock, for after the summo
ned birds ignited they too were unable to re-form.
The centipede blood phantom skittered closer to Ken, swordlike mandibles open wide. It arched its body upward, preparing to snap down.
Theron planted his feet as best he could on the blood-slick tile as Kendrick continued to crab-crawl back beneath the swing of Theron’s blades. He led with his mighty claymore in his right hand and Chayse’s sword in his left. The centipede’s mandibles were fed that classic hunter’s recipe, the one that—as far as Theron Ward was aware—could make anything moving with life or undeath fall still with truest destruction.
“Fire and sword!” he cried as he killed the sad knight again, and for the last time. The thing split in half right down its center, the arcane flame parting flesh and bone and ooze with equivalent ease.
Ken stumbled back to his feet, careful not to press his body to his flaming fist. The fire was somehow controlled from spreading onto him, but it could still burn him. It was burning him. An inch of flesh around the entirety of his mutilated wrist was beginning to bubble. It was a maddening pain. He bit down hard and fought on.
Ahead of him, Dammar faced the Patriarch’s remaining soldiers in the chapel. Their numbers had dwindled, but the demon had not come through the battle unscathed. His ten clawed arms hung limp, nearly dragging on the floor. His antlered skull with a thousand peering pink eyes lolled forward and heaved up and down with strenuous breaths. He had climbed the stairs and stood now atop the Patriarch’s podium, his back to the northern wall. The surviving officers of the Enlightened roared commands and prayers in Romarian as the troops reluctantly re-formed and approached the podium.
The surviving blood phantoms crawled and slithered into a single entity, a snaking river of skinless faces, appearing and disappearing in the waves that flowed away from the chapel, toward the mouth of the corridor where Aldous now finally came into view—an Aldous familiar enough to bear the name, but that was all.
The blood river split to pass by the wizard. He progressed through the vortex of violence, untouched by it, head high, chest full, his staff in one hand and what appeared to be a bowl in the other. His eyes were ignited red with flame, and from his lips dripped magma onto his naked chest, where it slid down his skin, leaving Aldous unburned.
Never again would Ken feel comfortable tousling the lad’s hair.
There was a momentary slowdown in the storm after the tidal wave of destruction the wizard had brought down upon all within the Patriarch’s most holy house.
A legless monk dragged himself, blubbering from his torment, dangerously close to the wizard. His white robes were painted red, and every inch of skin that Ken could see was crimson too. It made him nearly indistinguishable from the phantoms.
The wizard looked mighty sinister as he raised his staff above the monk’s head and, with strength Ken had never known the lad possessed, brought it down on the monk’s skull. Ken had no liking for that. It was too much like Ken and too little like Aldous.
Aldous Weaver the boy, who became a fierce young man at Dentin, looked now too much like a demon. His face was blackened with ash; his eyes burned; his hair had become a blazing mane; and the magma still dripped from his lips.
The line of the regiment of spearmen that was tasked with slaying Dammar backed away from the wizard with enough effort stirred by fear to push the front of the rank closer to Dammar on the other side.
Ken turned back to face the hunter. The sight of Aldous as he was reached inside him and pulled forth Kendrick the Cold. It was either that or grab the lad and shake him until he doused the flame on his bubbling wrist. Ken decided the former to be the better option of the two.
Theron stood an arm’s length away, his nose and short beard completely soaked in blood, his blond hair dyed with it. His dark steel chain mail shone red and orange from the light cast by his flaming blades.
Ken turned from Theron to watch as Aldous approached, murmuring words in unfamiliar languages.
With a hiss and a pop, the flame engulfing his iron fist snuffed out. Ken lifted his wrist; it was nearly cooked through to the bone, and although the fire had gone, the pain had not. He wondered if the lad had some magic for that.
“Aldous? Is it you, lad? Is it still you?” Ken asked, his gaze drawn to the bowl the wizard held.
“It’s me.”
The fire in his eyes had faded and his hair was black once more, hanging loose about his ash-covered face. His voice was once again the lad’s, no thunderous reverberation, just the trembling of fear.
Ken’s gaze again dipped to the bowl, and his mouth felt dry.
Aldous lifted the bowl and held it out to Ken. In it was a glowing, dark purple-red liquid, so deep it appeared almost black. On the surface of the liquid was the reflection of the ravens flying above, close to the chapel’s painted ceiling. They gleamed like scores of shooting stars. It stirred in Ken a feeling of insignificance in the face of eternity. He leaned a little closer and was hit by a nauseating hunger and thirst. Thirsty. So thirsty.
“Drink,” Aldous said.
Theron stumbled up next to them, stabbing his flaming swords into a pile of four corpses. The smoke from the cooking flesh entered Ken’s nose and he retched, not from repulsion, but from the terrible rising hunger for the contents of the bowl.
He took a step back.
Theron dipped his finger into it, and the sight of the glowing deep purple liquid rippling around his digit was nearly unbearable. But Kendrick the Cold had faced magic before, he’d faced curses and demons before, so he held fast and awaited Ward’s final call.
“What is this?” the hunter asked, his tone far from putting Ken at ease.
Even as he asked it , Theron was aware of the answer.
Demons came to this world in one of at least three ways: from the cosmos, through habitation of a human vessel, or birthed through sorcery and a woman’s womb. He had read extensively on the matter. If Dammar was here—and he most certainly was here—then he had been born. Truly reborn.
So what Theron really wanted to know was where had Aldous obtained a bowl filled with the birthing fluid of a great celestial demon or, in this case, the rebirthing fluid. Theron lifted his finger from the bowl and watched the primordial ooze drip off and fall back down into the bowl, where it rippled, warping the shapes of Aldous’s flaming ravens above.
He looked for his own reflection in the surface, and saw nothing. Only magic is visible.
He glanced at Ken and read in his face the same urge to drink that was growing in Theron. The need pounded through him in time with the ache in his head.
“A monster,” Aldous said. “In the wine cellars. It nearly killed me. I slew it, and a voice, the same voice I heard at Dentin, she told me to drink the blood. I was dying, drained of my power…and now—”
You leave out much, my young friend. But it is no matter. Not now. Now we must survive.
Theron could not take his gaze from the bowl. He was hungry. Thirsty. Ravenously so.
And weak. His wounds bleeding, his head pounding. He fell to one knee.
“It is the only way out of this! You must drink it!” Aldous pleaded, and pushed the bowl in front of Theron’s face. The liquid sloshed, and for a moment Theron saw something else appear in the reflection, a red-eyed beast with the skull of a bear, a thin layer of charred flesh clinging to it. On its back and shoulders were thousands of wriggling, short blue tendrils in the place of fur. It loomed over the bowl, dipping its head toward it. Right where Theron’s face should be, the beast’s reflection was cast.
Keep telling yourself you are a good man, brother.
Somewhere deep, his sister’s chastising words sounded, but they were easy to smother now, for his lips were at the rim of the bowl. His eye still open, he sipped, as he stared into the soul of the beast peering back from the purple-black abyss.
He had swallowed several gulps when he was forced upright. His heart set to pounding as it never had.
Theron collapsed back to his knees, holding his
ears, and he knew he was screaming in pain because his throat felt as though it were going to at any moment rip apart, but he could not hear himself.
He had expected the pain to accompany the draught; he had not hoped for it, though. This was the reaction that happened from a mortal man drinking too much of something he most certainly should not be drinking.
He was aware of the melee around him, but it did not touch him. Then the drumming began to quiet down, his head began to cool, but for the soothing stream of warmth he felt running from his nose and eye. My brains are leaking from me. The thought was accompanied by no anxiety. His whole body was cooling down.
Next to him, his swords still blazed, cooking the corpse pile. Fat popped, and a scalding drop splashed onto the unarmored part of Theron’s upper forearm. By the time he turned to gaze at the wound, it was healing. The boil formed, deflated, scabbed, and scarred in seconds. And then not even the scar remained.
Theron’s head was finally clear. His brains had not evacuated his skull after all, just some blood and all the pressure. He had survived the consumption of the demonic ichor.
This will not last.
He pushed to his feet and strode toward his swords where they stuck straight up from the burning bodies. His racing heart had slowed to a steady pace of hammer blows. Invigorated, he grabbed his claymore by the hilt and pulled it free; the fire eating the corpses licked at his cloak, and he swept it back.
He turned to Kendrick, whose head was beginning to loll to one side. His braided beard dangled and dripped, logged with blood. A tougher man Theron was certain there would never be, but the cursed crusader was at his end unless he drank the from the bowl that the wizard held toward him.
“Drink it, Ken,” Theron ordered. “You gave me your oath. You may not die yet. I did not save you, I did not bring you back, just for you to die here. This isn’t nearly the end.” With each word Theron felt himself strengthening, and on the utterance of the last syllable, his stomach turned and a heat that was not bile rushed up his throat.