by Joe Jackson
They made their way to the entrance to the citadel, and within minutes were escorted into a wide audience hall in the presence of the city’s resident lord. The citadel was warm on the north side with the sun shining strongly on it. Lord Ferreira’s audience chamber was broad and deep, with many high windows that allowed in even more sun. Banners and tapestries caught the light and displayed the brilliant colors of their coat of arms. There was no throne, but rather a desk with a high-backed, cushioned chair for the baron. The stone floor was even carpeted, which kept it a little warmer under the feet of the two serilian-rir.
Lord Ferreira sat at his desk, and he waved Erik and Aeligos forward immediately. The baron appeared to be in his fifties, but despite his studious nature, he obviously kept himself in shape. His hair was graying at the temples, but was otherwise a deep black, slicked back with tonic. His eyes were brown and intense under bushy brows, and the short beard that lined his jaw gave him an imperious look. Still, his expression was welcoming despite the grim nature of his summons, and Erik and Aeligos approached the desk and bowed their heads politely.
“Ah, demonhunter, thank you for coming so quickly,” he said, which Erik found strange if Aeligos had been searching for him for an hour. “My scouts’ reports and the smoke from the south were alarming enough, but we have now sighted a plume of smoke to the southwest. My scouts reported seeing a half-demon warrior with a wolf at its side headed in that direction, and believe that they may be a part of the force that you are looking for.”
Erik and Aeligos exchanged a glance. “Maybe, maybe not,” Erik said. “I just received word from the head of my Order that she sent other help to us, and they should be meeting us in this area. It’s possible the half-demon you saw was one of my fellow hunters, though if he was traveling with a wolf or large dog, I can’t think of who it could be.”
“Don’t you have a Blackwolf working for the Order?” Aeligos asked, playing dumb.
Erik had to stifle a laugh. “Don’t be ridiculous, that’s just his name,” he said.
The baron seemed confused by what they were suggesting, but didn’t pry. “Well, whatever the case, I expect you now know what you were waiting on confirmation of,” Lord Ferreira said. “Should I send out some of my cavalry to assist you?”
Erik deferred to Aeligos, turning toward his younger brother and gesturing for him to answer. “I’d recommend you send the cavalry west toward Bantry, and have them make sure that whatever we’re looking for, it doesn’t get past them and into the heartlands,” the rogue said. The baron immediately nodded with the assessment, as did the other men with him. “If your infantry are antsy to be helpful, you could start stationing them along the river to the south, and have them secure the homestead that was set ablaze. That should be the first step in pushing our enemies back west again, or at least halting their advance east.”
“Good thinking,” the baron said. “You feel confident, then, in confronting our enemies with just your small group?”
“We feel confident in going and seeing exactly what it is we’re dealing with,” Erik said. “If it turns out it’s something too large for us to handle, at the very least, we’ll act as advance scouts for you and the other cities, and help organize a concerted counterattack.”
“Can I offer you anything from my armory?” Lord Ferreira asked.
“We’ve just spent the day provisioning and getting supplied, my lord,” Erik answered. “You worry about the city and your neighbors; we’ll take things in the field from here.”
“Go with the gods, then,” the baron said by way of dismissal.
“Let’s go. We need to find Gabrius, Sonja, and Serenjols,” Erik said, but his words were hardly necessary. He was glad to escape the citadel without having to explain that the “wolf” the scouts had seen was actually a werewolf. And with that in mind, Erik was left to wonder who the hunter could be if they were traveling with Sharyn. They certainly had to have experience with werewolves, enough so to trust Sharyn. Either that, or they encountered her in lupine form and it didn’t strike them as odd that a wolf decided to accompany them.
Erik and Aeligos left the citadel and made their way toward the church of the Ghost, the nearest stop to gather the rest of their companions. They encountered Gabrius walking the streets around the citadel, apparently finished with his inquiries at the Ghost’s temple. The half-brys paladin fell into step with Erik and Aeligos, and said, “We still don’t have anything reliable as far as what we are dealing with, but the scouts of the various cities of this county seem to agree that it is not a sizeable force, whatever it is. The suggestion that it is a single demon, however unlikely, seems to best fit the information we have received.”
“That agrees with what the baron’s own scouts have told us,” Erik said. “Did you hear anything else at the temple? Kari sent word that reinforcements from the Order were coming, I wasn’t sure if the same may be true of your Order, since we lost Markus.”
“Unfortunately not,” Gabrius said. “How long before we can expect your reinforcements to arrive?”
“That’s why we’re leaving now,” Aeligos answered. “Sounds like someone is already on the demon’s trail, and from what the scouts reported, it seems Sharyn already met and teamed up with whoever it is.”
“It is only one more hunter, though?” the half-brys asked.
“Yes. Kari didn’t say who it was, but I suspect it’s someone high-ranking if she sent them this way alone,” Erik said. “You don’t have any idea where Sonja went, do you?”
“I do not,” Gabrius affirmed.
They continued toward the smithy, easily identifiable with its distinctive plume of smoke and soot. Erik wasn’t sure any of his companions would know where Sonja was. His hope was that by the time they fetched Serenjols and made their way down to the stables, Sonja may have gotten there herself. From what he had heard, Sonja was practicing the arcane arts differently now, without a book. Erik knew next to nothing about the arcane, but he assumed it meant she wouldn’t be spending any long days and nights transcribing spells with the other sorcerer. If that was the case, it might turn out she was already looking for them, and with her arcane abilities, she could probably find them easily enough.
Serenjols was still at the smithy. It looked as though he had volunteered to do some work around the forge, stripped of his armor down to the waist. He seemed to already have a good rapport with the human smiths, who stood watching the prowess of the massively muscled half-guardian. More amusingly than that, there was a trio of young rir girls watching Jol at work, and their wide eyes and giggles only became more pronounced when Erik approached. Suddenly, they all darted up the road, laughing and looking at the half-demon men over their shoulders as they retreated.
“What was that about?” Erik asked Aeligos. If any of his companions would understand women, it would be Aeligos.
The rogue shrugged. “I’m sure they just don’t see half-demons down this way all that often,” he answered, and he held his hand up toward Jol. “Serilian-rir, whatever.”
Jol chuckled and went back to hammering a piece of glowing steel. Gabrius piped in, “I also doubt they see so many of our kind in such a range of heights.”
Sonja appeared suddenly with a muffled thunderclap, and Erik stepped back defensively. It seemed odd that she would teleport after explaining that doing so had allowed Taesenus to find them a few weeks earlier. There was a hardness to the set of her eyes when she faced Erik, and he wondered if the meeting with the other sorcerer had gone badly. She gestured toward the west, and said, “There’s smoke coming from two directions now. We need to get moving.”
Jol set his hammer aside and offered a quick apology for having to leave, which the other smiths assured him was unnecessary. He began putting his armor back on.
Erik turned back to Sonja. “What are you doing? I thought teleporting drew too much attention.”
His sister waved off his words. “At this point, I would welcome whatever we hunt to come to us,�
� she said, which alarmed Erik. “And if Taesenus is stupid enough to show his face again, this time, we’ll have the strength to deal with him.”
Erik’s first instinct was to tell her she was being foolish, but he bit back the words and decided not to argue right now. There was a certain logic to the thought of drawing their quarry to them, but the prospect of Taesenus arriving and becoming a whole other problem was exactly what Erik was afraid of. Once Jol was fully dressed and had bid his farewells, the group made its way north down the slope of the hill toward the stables. Sherman and Katarina were there, tending to a pair of horses, and the paladins came over when they saw the entire group was gathered.
“We’re on the move,” Erik said to the twins. “What’ve we got for mounts?”
“We have some horses across the river waiting for us,” Katarina said. “They don’t have anything large enough for you, Jol, or Sonja to ride, but just having horses for Sherman, Gabrius, and myself will let us keep up with the rest of you with regard to your stamina.”
“I suppose that’ll have to do. Let’s get down to the ferry and get across the river quickly. There’s smoke coming from the south and the west, and the baron’s scouts say there’s someone traveling with a black wolf between the two sites.”
“Sharyn,” Sherman muttered. “Any idea who she’s with?”
“Someone Kari sent to help,” Erik answered. “Sonja can track them with her arcane sight. Let’s get going.”
They left the city and were soon ferried across the river toward the southwest. The west-most river, called the Hogue, was wide but fairly slow-moving. Ferryboats or skiffs took people across as often as necessary, keeping the flow of trade from the western farms and homesteads to the city moving steadily. The ease of travel was a small blessing, but Erik’s mind focused more on the population to the west, where the plumes of smoke had been spotted. It was possible the farms and homesteads to the west were fully under attack, and the people leaving the city to head that way might have no idea yet.
There was a discount trading post on the other side of the river, offering slightly lower pay for goods in exchange for saving travelers a trip into the city. There, the mounts Katarina had promised were hitched, waiting for their new owners. Katarina led her brother and Gabrius to the trader’s post. After a short conversation, the three mounted up and came back over to Erik and the others. Gabrius seemed strangely accustomed to being in the saddle, something Erik wasn’t expecting from the half-brys, considering he said he’d never really ridden.
“Do you want us to ride ahead and see if we can either spot some sign of our quarry, or the reinforcements Kari sent?” Katarina asked.
“No, I don’t want to split us up and put you in more danger,” Erik said, but he waved off his own words. “But we can’t be stupid about this; we’re already chasing this thing. Try to find the other hunter or hunters first, and if you encounter the demon, fall back to us in as orderly a fashion as you can.”
“Yes, sir,” Katarina answered with a salute.
Erik was surprised; usually when his friends or siblings answered him like that, it was sarcastic and mocking. Katarina had apparently meant it, and the way Sherman and Gabrius echoed her salute seemed to confirm that. He was shaken from his stupor when Sonja stepped forward, her eyes glowing golden as she looked around at random. “Sonja, you all right?” Erik asked.
“There’s a half-demon with a wolf a few miles that way,” she said, pointing off to the southwest.
Erik nodded; he should have guessed she was using an eagle eye enchantment to get a look at the immediate area. He still wasn’t used to her using her power without any gestures, chants, or consulting her book first. Erik sent the three paladins off with a gesture, and they all saluted him again before they turned and rode off. Erik watched the trio depart, but Katarina in particular held his attention. She was turning into a fine leader herself, and as she rode away from him, her tabard blowing in the wind behind her shining, armored form, Erik thought she looked like one of the Valkyries of human legend.
“All right, let’s get moving,” Erik said, and his siblings fell into step with him.
“Sonja,” Jol said lightly.
Erik turned to see what his elder brother wanted. When Sonja looked at Jol, the eldest of the Tesconis children tilted his head slightly and raised his brows. Sonja started laughing. Erik and Aeligos joined in, and they began to put some miles behind them. Erik was still shocked at the changes he was seeing in Jol, and the warrior’s suddenly light demeanor seemed to be having an effect on everyone around him. Here they were, headed into mortal danger, and not only was Jol talking, but he was joking around.
There wasn’t a lot of chatter amongst the siblings as the day wore on. Erik turned them more westward after a couple of hours, when the plume of smoke the baron’s scouts had talked about became easily noticeable. Their paladin friends hadn’t returned yet, but Erik was satisfied that they may have met with his fellow hunter and then headed toward the smoke. With a possible confrontation looming, Erik urged his siblings to pick up their pace. He and Jol were the slowest because of their heavy armor, but their long strides and half-guardian constitution allowed them to keep up fairly well.
The edge of a village came into sight as the sun began to slide toward the horizon, and Erik was thankful that there was no foot traffic headed this way. Only a few of the buildings in the hamlet were smoldering; the rest were damaged, but there were no fires still raging. A lone woman stood off to the side, surveying the damage, so paralyzed with fear and grief that she didn’t even notice the four half-demons approach. Erik gestured for his siblings to begin looking around but stay together, and he moved over toward the solitary figure.
“Ma’am, are you all right? We’re here to help,” he said as soothingly as possible.
There was no response. Erik approached from the side so she would see him before he got too close, but she didn’t even turn to regard him until he got clearly in her field of vision. By then, he understood something was wrong: there were trails of blood staining her cheeks, having run down from her eyes, which were clouded and glazed over. Her hands, also streaked with blood that had streamed down her arms from numerous cuts, came up toward Erik, and she began to shamble after him.
“Watch out, some of these townspeople are undead!” he shouted after his siblings.
“Not some of them, Erik. All of them,” came Aeligos’ reply, followed shortly by the sickening squelch of someone being cut down by Jol’s two-handed sword.
“Who the hell did this?” Erik growled. He drew his blades and started to swing for the woman’s neck, but he stopped himself. Undead or not, he didn’t want to desecrate her remains by decapitating her. He reminded himself that this was likely someone’s wife or mother, and having to deal with the fact that she was dead and had been animated would be bad enough. Erik swallowed uneasily and sidestepped the shambling creature, and he was able to land a well-aimed blow to the back of the neck, which dropped the body lifelessly once again.
He made his way farther into the village after his siblings, and found that Aeligos’ words had been no exaggeration. There were dozens of animated corpses stumbling about, shredded by the claws of their unknown quarry, perhaps, and then reanimated by some evil. Aeligos and Jol were working to disable the zombies, and though Jol had cut one clean in half, he and Aeligos seemed to have come to the same conclusion as Erik. They were disabling the undead without destroying them completely, being as delicate about it as possible.
Sonja was ignoring the zombies, sidestepping or gruffly shoving them away as she stormed through the center of the village. Erik decided to follow in her wake, and he severed a few more undead spinal cords along the way. He wasn’t sure his coup-de-grace attacks were actually snuffing the undead, but they were at least being disabled and falling harmlessly to the ground. Erik had to trust that Sonja would know how to sever the animating forces completely, but she seemed on a mission at that moment. The demonhunter assumed
she might be on the trail of whoever had animated the corpses to begin with.
The village was small and tightly-knit, and Erik and Sonja passed through to the other side in a matter of minutes. The demonhunter was shocked to find a group of men on the far side that appeared to have no wounds. Their movements when they noticed the newcomers answered his unspoken question: these had to be the ones responsible. They weren’t what Erik was expecting; they looked like typical, nondescript human men and women, nine in total, wearing normal, everyday clothing with nothing distinctive about them. Erik had expected them to more closely resemble the necromancers of legend: dark robe-clad people of ill repute.
“You there! What are you about?” Erik barked at them. Sonja glanced at Erik as though he was crazy to even bother trying to talk. The reason why came a moment later, when one of the humans raised a hand and muttered something under his breath. Erik swept Sonja behind him, and a thin beam of sickly, green light shot forth and hit him in the chest. It left a pang of cold just under the surface of his flesh, but otherwise seemed to have no harmful effect. “Why you son of a….,” Erik blurted, incredulous.
Sonja came around Erik’s side and her eyes glowed with barely-restrained fury. Erik had seen his sister use arcane power many times, but usually for utility purposes. She was adept with lightning strikes, but he had never seen her look so furious or as full of power as she did at that moment. Without a shout of protest or a word of warning, Sonja clenched both fists and threw them upwards, as though throwing a clumsy double-uppercut at some unseen foe. The ground before the necromancers rose up and formed a row of hardened, spiky stalagmites. Sonja then threw her hands open, and the rocky formations exploded into a hail of rock and razor-sharp slivers.
The humans dispersed quickly in the face of Sonja’s initial assault, their clothing and exposed flesh well-shredded. Sonja moved forward without pause, and Erik felt a sudden gust of wind emanate from her, apparently a shield of arcane force she erected. He wanted to stay with his sister, but Erik was confident she could handle herself with this newfound arcane might, so he ducked along the side of the closest house and tried to circle around to flank some of their enemies.