by Heath Pfaff
16.2
The courtyard was dark, as though night were full upon us, and a cloudless one at that. The lanterns, fueled by the school’s intricate system of gas and auto-sparking igniters, were burning bright, but they were like small spots of glow struggling against the oppression of the void that sought to snuff them out. I could see a small circle of illuminated ground around each of them, but not much else. They highlighted the paved path down the center of the courtyard that lead to the wall beyond. This place hardly looked like the one that we’d entered every single year to break in the new candidates. I couldn’t even make out the sand bowl where we did our sparring.
The stillness upon the place was the worst of it. The air didn't stir, and nothing at all moved. There were no bats chasing insects dancing around the lights, and no insects either. There were no crickets singing to one another in chorus, and no distant voices drifting in from the city beyond the wall. It was still, and it was quiet. If I’d had to pick a single word to describe the feeling, I would have picked “stifling,” because it felt like even the air was having difficulty existing in this place. Breathing seemed a chore.
“Let’s go.” A hushed whisper sounded next to me. It was Korva, obviously seeing that we needed something to get us moving again. It was hard to do anything other than stand there and take in how much the world had changed. The school, the city beyond, none of it was what it had been when last we’d been here. It was familiar and strange all at once, and that was very unsettling.
Korva’s voice had broken the spell of our paralysis. We started out down the paved walk between the school and the gate, passing down the corridor of light that was struggling to exist in the dark. “I’m afraid I don’t know the way to your old home, Lillin, so you’ll have to lead the way once we’re out of here.”
“I can do that. It isn’t far off our route to the castle. My parents had a home in the merchant district.” I explained, keeping my voice low since it seemed too loud in the stillness. The merchant district was just this side of the private community for the council, and that was situated near the inner wall which surrounded the castle which was called Black Mark, though the entire city went by that name as well. When people spoke of Black Mark from within the city, they were generally talking about the castle. The stone walls were mostly black, and it was built around a central tower that looked somewhat like a mark scratched into the sky when seen from a distance. When I’d been little the whole thing had been very impressive to me, though all these years later I had seen wonders the likes of which Black Mark just couldn’t compete with. It was still impressive, but almost mundane by comparison, or perhaps only mundane because I’d grown up with it all of my life.
We reached the gate out into the city soon enough and discovered that it was laid wide open. There were no guards there, and the heavy crank system normally used to seal the doors was ripped from the ground. The metal support structure, bars thicker than my waist, were twisted and bent. I didn’t want to imagine what could do something like that. The entry door, large enough for five horses drawing carts to enter abreast, and high enough to allow a small building through, was torn outward. Something powerful had grabbed and torn the wall down around the entryway. It was probably the same something that had broken the crank for the door from its place, though that hardly mattered with most of the framing gone. The doors themselves were crushing a building to one side of the road beyond the school. It was impossible to tell what the building had been before it was reduced to rubble.
As we crossed the threshold of the school into the city beyond, sounds began to drift towards us, gouging into the silence like meat hooks into flesh at the butcher shop. There was a dull grating of decaying metal on metal that rang through the air at random, the song from a bird composed of old rusted weapons. Screams punctuated the stage set by the metallic noise, some inhuman, some all too familiar and much more disturbing for the recognizable nature of the suffering they indicated. This might very well be the city I had grown up in, but it was dressed in such a way that I could hardly recognize what I was seeing.
I had only rarely been out to the Warden’s academy while I lived with my family, so the area nearby wasn’t exactly familiar to begin with, but now it was much worse. I tried to situate myself, to get a sense of direction, but the imposing dark made that difficult. I’d lived in Black Mark long enough that I knew the general direction we should go, but looking down one of the dimly lit roads, I could make out no familiar waypoints. Some few of the torches for the city still burned, small points of resistance amid the black creeping air.
“We should go this way.” I decided, walking around the rubble of the gate that had spilled out into the street. “I’m not sure of the side roads here, but I’m pretty sure this runs northeast. That should lead us in the direction of the merchants district. As we get closer things should become more familiar.”
“Nothing here is familiar anymore.” Ori noted darkly.
“Let’s keep attentive. I haven’t seen any people, and it should be daytime. This area is normally heavily inhabited.” Korva’s voice was tense. I could see her eyes scanning the ground, and mine followed the course hers took. The streets were covered in dried blood, black streaks that filled the spaces between the cobblestones, and the reek of decay filled the air, coming from chunks of unidentifiable meat that lay scattered about. Occasionally a piece would have some feature that was clearly human, but the vast majority was too ruined to recognize. I wasn’t sure which was worse, though I thought it might all have been worse for the occasional piece of ear, or hand that lay in the wreckage. Those served to make it clear what the rest of the mess was. Something had torn through here, destroying everything in its path with a seemingly delighted and macabre energy. The scope of the death and madness I was witnessing was finally coming clear to me.
With that terrible clarity came panic and distress at the realization that it was very unlikely my family would be alive. How could they have survived this kind of devastation? How could anyone survive this?
“Lillin?” Ori’s voice swept through my downward spiral of thoughts. “Are you alright?”
I shook my head. “No, not really.” I took a deep breath. “Sorry, let’s go.” I forced myself to move as I spoke. I had wanted this. I needed to keep my head together and go forward. It was all we could do now.
We walked for twenty minutes, following the main street of the city until we reached a major crossroad marked by an extravagant fountain. The fountain still stood, but its waters were choked with bodies and no longer flowed through the piping. Atop the central spire, at its lofty peak, stood a long tower like protuberance that had once sprayed water in a dazzling, cascading disk. That display was something far more macabre now. Human bodies had been woven into a circle such that their legs were bound to the central mast at the bottom, and their upper bodies were draped forward as though stopped mid fall. The bodies lacked heads, necks splayed open like budding flowers, and metal spikes had been driven into them to hold the dead in their falling pose, the arms removed for reasons that were beyond me.
It stood like some kind of twisted art, a display of suffering.
“He brings them low,
He hangs them high,
And where he goes
The people die.”
A child’s voice piped up, singing from the other side of the fountain only to be joined a moment later by another.
“He cuts their meat,
And bleeds them too,
Some he’ll eat,
Those lucky few.”
And then together they sang a third verse.
“Piper, piper play your song,
While the dying sing along,
There is no hope that you can run
Because soon the Butcher comes.”
I found myself circling the fountain to see who would be singing such an unpleasant cadence, Ori and Korva in close pursuit. This wasn’t the kind of song children would sing, and this certainly wasn�
��t the kind of place I would expect children to be playing. Yet when I circled far enough to see them, it was indeed two children who appeared to be sitting and playing down by the side of the pool. They’d found a pile of bones and were arranging them into patterns on the ground. The one nearest us was a little girl dressed in a ragged dress. She had long blond hair that was streaked with crimson, and her dress was also covered in blood. It looked like she’d been playing in it.
“Oh, hello.” She giggled the words, looking up at us as we approached.
The other child, a boy of near the same age, stood up from his game. I had to guess them to be no more than eight or nine. His clothing was equally tattered, though he had dark hair, and a smile that set crooked upon his face and seemed a little too toothy.
“You shouldn’t have come here.” He said.
“You two shouldn’t be here. We can take you to the school if you want.” Korva spoke, her voice soft and concerned. “Where are your parents?”
“Parents?” The boy asked, sounding confused. “Oh . . .” He looked at the top of the fountain and pointed. “We have to stay here. They’re watching after us right now.” His smile never faltered, and after he spoke it grew wider yet, giving him an uncanny and frightful expression.
“Blackened.” Ori spoke the curse softly.
“I think maybe you should come with us.” Korva pressed. “It isn’t safe out here for children.”
“It isn’t safe out here for anyone.” The little girl giggled. “The Butcher is coming.”
The boy laughed and began to sing again. “Piper, Piper, play your song while the dying sing along. There is no hope that you can run because soon the Butcher comes.”
The girl laughed in delight and clapped her hands. “He’ll be here soon now, we just need to wait for . . . “ A strange, haunting sound began to slide through the air, crawling across the building tops and dragging itself down the streets. It was like a flute, but it had a screeching undertone to it that caught at the ear and made my eardrums reverberate in an unpleasant way.
“That’s the Piper.” The boy said. “He marks the hour with his song.”
A heavy footfall sounded to our right, and as one we turned to look at what had made the sound. A figure was walking down the street into the square from the right. It was impossibly tall, two men in height easily, though it was dressed in plain clothing as though some tailor had once crafted clothes for giants. The clothes looked old and decayed, but were still strapped to it’s misshapen body. It wore an apron that was clearly stitched together from human skin, the pieces recognizable even as long ago cured as they were, and the apron was covered in tools situated in loops of flesh. There were knives and shears of all different kinds, and lengths of rope as well. Its arms were too long, and ended in hands that had fingers with four joints per digit. They were long and spindly like the legs of some kind of massive insect.
It’s head was barren of features but for the two massive pits where its eyes should have been, and the hinged jaw that started almost on its neck at each side so that the bottom of its mouth hung open in an unbelievable gape. It’s tongue hung from its mouth, draped over row after row of tiny, razor-like teeth. The tongue looked like a bloated, black slug the size of a normal man’s arm. This monster was headed towards us clearly, one of it’s impossible arms reaching to its apron to draw a very large cleaver from where it hung in a loop of skin. The fingers crawled around the haft of the tool, seeming to latch onto each other to form a grip around the wooden grip.
Korva drew her weapon first, but Ori and I were very close behind. I was so focused on the monster, this “butcher,” that I didn’t even notice I was being attacked from the other side until it was too late. The small body of the little girl hit me hard, staggering me sideways and almost knocking me to the ground. I heard a metallic thud and thought that the boy may have tried the same thing on Ori, but I couldn’t look. Hot pain exploded in my arm as the girl bit me, laughter rolling up from her mouth as it cut into the flesh of my arm.
I snapped the catch on my weapon with the one hand I could move, dropping the second half of my weapon so I could make use of a smaller section of it. I didn’t give a second thought before I hit the girl on my arm hard, though not as hard as I could have. I didn’t want to kill her, just get her off of me. To my shock and horror she only bit down harder, impossibly hard for a little girl. Her tiny hands grabbed onto my body, her fingers ripping into my clothes and hooking into my flesh in a way that just wasn’t possible for a child, but then she wasn’t really a child at all.
It took me a moment to really understand what I was seeing. The skin on her face slid in a strange way, and as it did I saw the seams around the back of her skull, and as I looked at her fingers, I could see the claws ripped through the tips of the human appearing flesh. She wasn’t a child, but some monster wearing a child. As she tore into me again, I raised my weapon and delivered a much harder blow to her head. The result was that her stolen flesh tore, and a clump of her blond hair ripped away and splattered to the ground. Inside it was all bloody and slick, but I could see the thing beneath the surface now, a creature that looked made of just bone and sinew, like a human child had slipped it’s flesh and turned into a monster. It bit harder, it’s jaws grinding as it tore at me. I gave a roar of anger and hit it again, this time using my Will to push my weapon downward. The metal struck its head with explosive force and there was a loud crack as the skull broke and my attacker let out a plaintive scream that sounded too much like the child it appeared to be.
As soon as I felt the jaws release me I summoned my Will and pushed it off of me hard. It’s tiny body flipped across the space in front of me and slammed into the fountain as I grabbed the other half of my weapon from the ground and went after it.
I was full of horror and revulsion. It was wearing a child, and it had tricked all of us. There was something intrusive and terrible about that, a deep, unsettling wrongness that crept into me and made my skin crawl. I pinned it down with my Will and trained blows upon it, each striking with all the force I could muster until there wasn’t enough of it left to move any longer. Only as I laid my last blow on a squirming fragment of its body did I realize that there was still a fight going on behind me.
I turned to see Ori and Korva engaged with the big monster, the Butcher.
Ori had clearly already dispatched the smaller beast, her sword making quick work of it, and no doubt aided by the fact that she didn’t have any fleshy bits for it to rip and tear at. I jumped to the attack on the Butcher as well. Korva was battling it hard, her weapon cascading through the air in front of her as she pressed the attack.
The Butcher hardly seemed to notice as her weapon connected with its body again and again, sending chunks of flesh flying away from it with every blow. It made little effort stop the attacks from landing, but instead struck every time directly at Korva or Ori, swinging its cleaver with deadly intent. Korva was forced to back out and away, surges of her Will coming into play as she used it to increase the potency of her blows, and to speed the movements of her dodges and parries. It was strange that she wasn't directly attacking the beast with her Will. Pinning it down would have seemed a wiser move to me, but then using Will directly on an enemy could take a lot out of a Warden. It was often better just to use your will in small ways to make your combat more effective.
Ori had turned her attacks into massive swings of her sword. The blade cleft the air in front of her and wedged in the Butcher’s side, though this didn’t stop it from swing back at her. She managed to dodge a few of the blows, but one or two did land, hitting her metal body with enough force to knock her back and leave a scar on the very well crafted white armor.
I recovered the second half of my weapon as I approached, reassembling the staff quickly. I wasn’t sure where to launch my own attack. The other two were in tight with the monster, and that meant there was little room for me to do much of anything. I got closer and then used a powerful surge of will, grabbing
the Butcher and trying to force him down to his knees. The surge came at my beck and call, but it broke against the cleaver wielding horror. It was like my Will didn’t even hit him. I reached again, focusing directly on him, on slowing his weapon hand by forcing his arm back, and there was nothing to hold to. The butcher was a like a solid mass of void, something that I could throw Will into but that never seemed phased by the power. He wasn't resisting, he just wasn’t susceptible to Will.
Even a dead body could be moved with Will. If someone was strong enough, they could move the world, but the Butcher was a void. Dumping energy into it just made that energy fade away. That wasn’t even a possible occurrence that I was aware of. Suddenly Korva’s attacks made more sense. She hadn't directly used her Will on the enemy because it was completely immune.
I shifted my stance and charged the beast, using the pole of my staff to hurle myself through the air at its head. I divided my staff as I flew towards it, and by the time I hit, I was fully prepared to engage. I came in with both halves of my staff ready to strike, and I delivered the first two blows with all the force I could muster in momentum, and a push of Will. Had I hit a human person that hard in the head, it would have shattered their skull and dislocated it from their spine. The effect here was much, much smaller.