Etheric Knight

by P. J. Cherubino

  Etheric Knight

  Tales Of The Wellspring Knight: Book 4

  P.J. Cherubino

  Michael Anderle

  Etheric Knight (this book) is a work of fiction.

  All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Sometimes both.

  Copyright © 2018 P. J. Cherubino, Michael T. Anderle, CM Raymond, LE Barbant

  Cover by Ryn Katryn Digital Art

  Cover copyright © LMBPN Publishing

  LMBPN Publishing supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact support@lmbpn.com. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

  LMBPN Publishing

  PMB 196, 2540 South Maryland Pkwy

  Las Vegas, NV 89109

  First US edition, August 2018

  The Kurtherian Gambit (and what happens within / characters / situations / worlds) are copyright © 2015-2018 by Michael T. Anderle and LMBPN Publishing.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Epilogue

  Author Notes - P.J. Cherubino

  Author Notes - Michael Anderle

  Books By P.J. Cherubino

  Books By Michael Anderle

  Connect with The Authors

  Etheric Knight Team

  Thanks to the JIT Readers

  James Caplan

  Mary Morris

  Paul Westman

  Keith Verret

  Peter Manis

  Daniel Weigert

  Larry Omans

  Micky Cocker

  If I’ve missed anyone, please let me know!

  Editor

  Lynne Stiegler

  DEDICATION

  From P.J.

  To family and friends: those who were born on the path with me and those who choose to walk together.

  Thank you for helping me live this dream.

  I hope you enjoy the book.

  From Michael

  To Family, Friends and

  Those Who Love

  To Read.

  May We All Enjoy Grace

  To Live The Life We Are

  Called.

  Chapter One

  Afterparty

  Astrid had lost track of how many mugs of ale she had tipped back during the truce celebration. The floor seemed to sway as she tried to focus on the words this new man with dreadlocks spoke.

  He wore nothing but a small leather pouch on a string around his middle and carried a blowpipe across his back that matched his height. Astrid rarely drank this much, and this was why. As soon as she let her guard down, some new challenge popped up.

  Oh, well, Astrid thought. Get your head together and deal with it.

  “OK, Tracker,” Astrid asserted. “Your timing is not so great. At this moment, I’m not prepared to take on any Irth-saving missions. Maybe tomorrow...”

  She was still processing the violent whirlwind of events that had occurred in the past year of her life. She had battled an armed, corrupt bureaucracy and liberated two villages and several keeps. She was almost hanged, fought a powerful mage to the death, and took his place as the leader of a small nation. The finale came three weeks ago when an army of thousands blew each other apart with magitech weapons.

  In retrospect, the inquiry was rather tame. It sounded like any other job. So she yielded. “Help us understand why you feel Irth is in danger.”

  The diminutive, wiry man cocked his head and squatted on his hams. He was a sibling of the shadows from which he had emerged just a few minutes ago. As he considered his words, his skin darkened further and blended into the dim space on the outskirts of flickering candlelight.

  “Well,” Gormer slurred as he sat down heavily at the long pine table that was still strewn with war plans. “Now we know why we didn’t see him.”

  Three weeks ago, a magitech rifle blast had nearly relieved Gormer of his head. Instead, the shot merely took his eyebrows. They had partially grown back, leaving him with a look of perpetual surprise. His face was no longer swollen from the beating he had taken as a prisoner before the battle, but the cut on his aquiline nose was still pink. This was the first occasion he’d had to do some well-earned drinking.

  He turned to Moxy, who happened to be Tracker’s cousin. “He’s got that invisibility thing going on, just like you.” He belched in punctuation.

  Astrid couldn’t help but compare the pixies. Both had high cheekbones, long chins, and pointed ears. While Moxy’s nose was long and slender, Tracker’s was what the New Ancients referred to as Romanesque. However, while Moxy’s skin was creamy white and her hair whiter, Tracker’s skin was deep brown, and his knotted hair was coal black. Depending on the light, his eyes changed from pitch black to dazzling hazel.

  “Not invisibility,” Moxy responded, without taking her eyes off Tracker. “Camouflage. Like a chameleon, only better.”

  His real name wasn’t Tracker, of course. His pixie name wasn’t pronounceable to anyone in the room but Moxy. Magic had long ago altered the pixies. They were still human, but much more.

  “Do all pixies have this camouflage ability?” Vinnie asked, and squatted on his much more substantial hams in front of Tracker. He moved with a graceful motion that belied his tremendous girth.

  “Focus, everyone.” Astrid sighed. It felt as if she spoke to herself as much as the others. Her head swam with drink. “Tracker isn’t something for you to study, Vinnie.”

  “Why were you stalking us?” the Forge Monk Tarkon demanded in his customary gruff tone.

  Instead of answering their questions, Tracker locked eyes with his cousin. He spoke in a series of breathy words, clicks, and high-pitched trills.

  “If you want their help,” Moxy answered, “speak their language. Besides, I don’t believe in the bear shit you just said.”

  Only Tracker’s face was free of shadows, creating the impression that his head floated. “I think this was a mistake,” he replied so everyone could understand. “I assumed their warlike nature might help in the coming battle.”

  “Ugh,” Astrid moaned. “What battle? Come on, now. You can’t just literally walk out of the shadows, tell us Irth is in danger, then remain coy.”

  “Yeah,” Gormer mumbled with a gurgling belch. “I’ve had too much ale and cheese for this. Tell your story so I can pass out. No wait, I got it.” His eyes turned white as he called on mental magic. Tracker turned his now deep-brown eyes to him and for the first time, smiled. The expression on his face wasn’t friendly. It had turned into more of a grimace.

  “What the hell,” Gormer exclaimed. “What am I seeing?”

  “I’m letting you see what I saw. It is a fissure between worlds, where the creatures co
me from.” He looked at Moxy and continued. “The wall between the dream world and waking day breaks.”

  Moxy groaned and folded her arms across her chest. “This is the kind of crazy nonsense that made me leave the Homewood Range,” she declared. “There is no dream world. We’re nocturnal, and our perceptions change at night. That’s it. The dream world is nonsense. There is only Nature and her physical laws.”

  “You forget, cousin,” Tracker admonished. His eyes looked haunted. “I am a Shaman. I have climbed trees in the Dream World but have seen nothing like this. The night itself split open and set loose its creatures.”

  “This is the dreamworld monster that attacked me.” He reached into his leather pouch and with a flick of his wrist, he tossed a red object into a pool of candlelight between Astrid and Vinnie.

  It was about the size of Astrid’s hand and appeared cobbled together from crabs, lobsters, and insects. It was also missing parts. One of its slender, insect-like arms ended in an oblong claw with sharp teeth between the pincers. The other arm lacked its claw with only a cracked shell at one end. It didn’t appear to have a head, but she assumed that if it did, it would have been closest to the arms.

  “You removed its most dangerous parts,” Moxy observed. She backed away from the dead creature. “It smells wrong,” she said, crinkling her long, narrow nose.

  “It tried to take me,” Tracker replied. “What else would I do?”

  “Gormer,” Astrid asked. Her eyes remained fixed on the creature as they turned black, then glowed a dim blue. Her mind cleared as she drew from the Well to deal with the alcohol in her system. “What did you see in Tracker’s mind?”

  “I saw disturbing,” Gormer replied with a shudder. “I can’t think of any other way to say it. Disturbing. And it was not good. It was like a door with a frame made of...I don’t know...black lighting. It glowed white around the edges. It did look like a hole. It was like ripping cloth revealing a bit of skin beneath. I saw through...to something.”

  “Somewhere,” Tracker corrected. “Somewhere.”

  “Vinnie,” Astrid asked. “What’s your take?” She didn’t possess mental magic. She couldn’t read thoughts or experience the emotions of others like Gormer. But the thing on the floor frightened her. It was foreign to every idea she had about life. She could not explain why. She just knew. This thing did not belong.

  Vinnie pulled a thin metal rod from his embroidered tunic and poked at the strange, red carcass.

  “How old is this?” he asked while he pulled the thing closer with the rod.

  “I killed this last moon, when it attacked me in the lowland canopy of the seventh valley,” Tracker replied.

  “Well, that’s almost meaningless,” Astrid remarked.

  “To you, maybe,” Moxy replied a bit defensively. “That means he found it about five weeks ago, high in a tree in a valley forest to the southwest of here.”

  “Is there anything special about the Seventh Valley?” Astrid asked.

  “No,” Moxy replied. “We just number the mountain ranges between here and the Homewood.”

  Vinnie skewered the creature and held the body close to his face. “I can tell you one thing,” the scientist mage declared. “It is like no other creature I’ve studied. Whatever is inside this shell, it certainly isn’t muscle. I see possible organs, but I have no idea what they’re made of. Everything looks like gray snot.”

  “It is looking for the Arbori,” Tracker stated.

  “The Arbori?” Astrid repeated. “Are you talking about Charlie?”

  “Yes,” Tracker confirmed and left it at that.

  “Do you know Charlie’s people?” Astrid asked hopefully. They’d met the strange four-fingered person last fall. Charlie stood ten feet tall, but his behavior was often like that of a small child.

  “Do you think…” Tarkon asked, standing suddenly, “that Charlie is from the same place as these things.”

  “No way,” Gormer responded with heat. “Charlie is not a damn monster.”

  Charlie and Gormer had a close bond. Literally. Gormer was only one of two people Astrid knew who could communicate telepathically with the large boy. Charlie had tried to link with Astrid, but the images she saw confused and overwhelmed her.

  They stared at the dead creature impaled on Vinnie’s examination probe, lost in thought. Where did this tiny monster come from?

  BOOOM!

  The room, with its high, vaulted stone ceilings, became a percussion instrument. Astrid felt the vibration in her chest as everyone sprang to attention.

  Muffled blares of signal horns reached them. They counted the blasts. Two sharp, two long meant the attackers were inside the walls.

  A moment later, the thunderous sound of running feet rumbled down the hallway. The heavy oak door burst open, and a Fortress guard shouted, “Attackers in the assembly grounds!”

  “That’s where Charlie is!” Gormer shouted. He was the first out the door.

  Moxy hissed and slipped off her white silk robe. Her pale skin shimmered as she crossed the room toward the window and disappeared into the shadows. The leaded glass panes seemed to open by themselves. Astrid caught a glimpse of her shadow as it moved through the open window.

  While Moxy and Tracker’s pixie claws allowed them to climb down the wall, Astrid and the rest had to run. She grabbed two garrison swords from a rack on the wall and ran. She had left her rope dart in her quarters. There was no time to get it, nor was there time to put on her armor. She charged toward the commotion in a rough wool tunic and leather pants.

  She joined a stream of panicked soldiers, and civil guard all headed the same way. The spiral stone staircase was clogged with bodies.

  “Damn it!” Gormer shouted as he elbowed people aside. “Crappy building design!”

  It took them several minutes to run down from the high chamber to the ground level of Lungu Fortress. The wide, sandstone hallways were dotted with bleeding corpses. Here and there, medics tended to the wounded. Several people knelt by corpses and mourned.

  “What did this?” Astrid exclaimed.

  “Remnant!” a woman shouted in reply as Astrid passed.

  “What?” Astrid skidded to a stop and grabbed the woman by the shoulders. “Did you say remnant?”

  The woman bled from a gash across her forehead, and her right eye was swollen shut. A bloody sword hung by her side.

  “They tore through here slashing and killing as they went,” the woman murmured, then turned her haunted face down the hallway.

  “How did they get in?” Vinnie asked.

  “Never mind that,” Astrid replied, and took off toward the sounds of battle.

  They joined a throng of armed people. Astrid noticed the estate crests of people she had fought against just weeks ago. One of the men, a Mover from the house of Cogol, gave her a surprised look.

  “I hate remnant,” he shouted.

  “We have that in common,” Astrid growled as they spilled out into the assembly yard. The Cogol Mover stayed by her side.

  She nearly ran into a group who had stopped suddenly in front of her. When Astrid pushed through them, she almost froze herself. It took a great act of will to rush toward what felt like a hole in her sanity.

  It was exactly as Gormer described—a jagged border of trails radiated out from a portal like cracks in black glass. Beyond the nightmarish window pane was a shadowed forest where remnant rushed toward her with glowing red eyes.

  “Form a line!” Astrid shouted. Vinnie appeared at her right hand, as usual, and Tarkon stood to her left.

  Where was Gormer?

  Suddenly, Tarkon screamed. Astrid saw his mouth and eyes open wide, his face pale. She’d seen him walk calmly into a line of twenty crossbow soldiers without blinking. This was something else. She slapped him across the face, and he staggered backward.

  “Gormer!” he exclaimed. “The remnant—they’re doing something to his mind. I felt it.”

  The two had a deep bond. Astrid didn’t need
to hear more. “Go find him!” she shouted.

  Tarkon drew two long daggers from the sheaths at the small of his back and charged back to find Gormer. A defensive line formed around Astrid and Vinnie. More fighters arrived to handle the remnant that were loose around the grounds. Some were former bandits, others were trained Estate soldiers. All of them hated remnant.

  As Astrid watched more of the demented mutants pour through the portal, she realized they didn’t behave normally. The remnant acted more animal than human. They were holdovers from the time when the world went mad. Her ancestors called that time the “dark waters.” In the Protectorates, they called it “the madness.”

  Before Ezekiel revealed his magical teachings to his disciples, the remnant were common in most of the world. Some perverse magic took hold of ordinary people and made them murder and devour normal humans. Those who accepted Ezekiel’s magical teachings learned to defeat the mad, pushing them back to remote regions. But remnant normally didn’t fight in organized formations, and they didn’t show strategy. These remnant did.

  Their eyes were also different. Normally, they were blood red. Now, their eyes glowed like rubies under a noon desert sun. She was certain if more of these beasts showed up, they would be in serious trouble.