The Demon Shroud

by T. A. Miles

  © T.A. Miles 2017

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Table of Contents

  The Demon Shroud

  Copyright

  ARC Info

  Map

  Prologue

  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

  Epilogue

  Prologue

  A river of soldiers wound their way through the trees outside of Endmark. Nearly five hundred men marched beneath the banner of a dead king, outfitted from the armory of a century-dead fortress that was miles behind them. A broken bloodline had not broken their morale; at least, not completely.

  On horseback, Tahlia rode alongside the rows of troops. The armored horses of the generals were at the lead for now, though three of the four would drop back before they met with the enemy. The remaining cavalry was strung in lines paralleling the foot soldiers.

  Tahlia was not officially part of the army. She represented the Vassenleigh Order, whose loyalty and support was for the Old Kingdom, but she would be doing her part in battle, as would her fellow priests. There were four of them present to assist, in the event that demonic forces should enter into it.

  In Edrinor’s battle with Morenne, that was too often the case. But they had heard news of a recent success to the west, at the keep in Lilende, where the dark allies of the Morennish people had attempted to undermine their forces. That victory had undoubtedly encouraged men presently marching to battle.

  Priests were not so readily swayed; the reality of the Vadryn was too present for most of them. It was that thought which inspired Tahlia to scan the near troops in search of her fellows. Her partner was nearby, a pale, long-limbed man of a deceptively quite outward nature. Somewhere behind them were their colleagues. Tahlia refrained from looking back at the other pair directly, and thought that the action sufficiently established her guard.

  But then her partner said, “They’re still back there.”

  “I know that, Jhac.” A mild glare was cast in his direction, but he hardly dignified it. She liked to imagine that he only smiled when she didn’t look at him. The notion tended to inspire a smile from her—only when he wasn’t looking, of course. “You’re a healthy serving of winter, you know that?”

  If Jhac had a response, verbal or otherwise, he wasn’t given time to deliver it. The generals called a sudden halt to the march, demanding all focus to the front of their formation.

  As everyone drew to a standstill, Tahlia strained to see past the upright spears, pikes, banners, and the line of mounted commanders gathered before her. The forest wasn’t helping. Though the trees were well-spaced with tidy limbs, they were quite tall and their boughs all seemed to begin at eye-level for one on horseback, making it impossible to see even to the near horizon that was on offer.

  There seemed a nervous energy about, and the air felt potent and full of possibility. Possible danger was what it currently felt like.

  “What’s happening?” she mumbled, reaching for the bladed staff harnessed at her back. In the process, she managed a glance at the priests behind them. One of the pair made eye contact in that moment, though didn’t hold it. Her light blue eyes seemed to flash a warning at Tahlia.

  Returning her focus to the front of the line, Tahlia became witness to sudden chaos.

  Men began to back up and turn around. Horses reared. Pole-blades and banners were dropped. Even the generals wanted nothing to do with what lay ahead.

  What was coming at them, directly.

  The oncoming force moved so swiftly, that the sound of it seemed to follow after the sight of it. Which couldn’t be possible. Nevertheless, a heavy cloud of dust and ash rolled in their direction with the power of a tidal wave, rumbling—albeit after the fact—as if it had been the enemy forces charging through the woods in number that would out-populate all of the northern reaches. The fierce speed of it left time for nothing, save loose awareness of horses and men panicking, of Jhac working the beginnings of a spell that had no hope of shielding them, and of being torn from the saddle.

  Tahlia felt herself tumble once in the air before striking ground and rolling over it repeatedly. The earth sloped abruptly and sent her carting into a ravine that took her roughly in its dense arms. She struck the far side of it headlong. Though she raised her arms instinctively, she was unaware whether or not she had managed to protect her head at all when the impact knocked her back and left her splayed over a protrusion of exposed roots.

  With her eyes half open, she watched a blurred rush of cloud and debris race across the sky, as if caught in flood waters. But there was no water.

  The thought held itself for a timeless span. Tahlia could not be sure if she was conscious for all of the moments that passed. A large, ornate fly threw itself in and out of her view at erratic intervals while she observed the rending of the sky.

  At some point, everything had stilled. When she thought that she could move again, Tahlia sat up, only to be imbalanced by the uneven surface beneath her, which pitched her onto the leaf-littered ground.

  She landed on her hands and knees, holding herself steady for a moment as her head took a turn internally that left her queasy. When she recovered, she took a careful look around. Her staff lay not far away. There was nothing, and no one else, in the ravine with her. She would have expected the bodies of fellow survivors and the dead, but the area was entirely abandoned.

  After a few more moments to steady herself, Tahlia moved toward her staff. She collected it and rose to her feet. Aches came to life all over. Looking at herself, she saw blood on her shirtsleeves and trousers, and mud on her tunic. Ordinarily, that might have been worrying, but her mind was not accepting anything properly for the moment. Everything hurt, including to breathe. Still, she made it happen, and made herself walk to the wall of the ravine as well. Climbing up it happened in lengthy stages of rest and suffering.

  She could not drag herself over the lip when she came to it. Instead, she clung to the ravine wall and looked across at the place an army had lately been marching. Her eyes were met with only forest.

  The impossibility of not one body—whether human or animal—of scarce damage to the trees, and no sign, even of the enemy, was more than she could bear. Her strength gave out, sending her back toward the floor of the ravine, and to stillness.

  One

  “It’s been several weeks since the conflict should have begun at Endmark, and there’s been no word.”

  The voice trailed Ashwin from his chambers, onto a terrace of polished brown stone, which descended onto a garden. The garden was one of a cascading series, each lined with stone colonnades wrapped in flowering growth. The tiered landscape was part of the Vassenleigh Citadel, a massive structure built into a natural rock wall that towered over the flatter plains and meadows of the south-central region of Edrinor. It had been in place for over a millennium. Over time, the city had grown beneath it, and within walls that were, in part, rounded extensions of the mountain itself. Th
e citadel’s reach had very much come to mean the arms of a protector to Vassenleigh’s people. Only once had that embrace been broken. But faith had never been broken among the city’s population. The generations continued to support the Order. They continued to support Ashwin and his fellow council, who were among the most ancient at Vassenleigh.

  The thought could not comfort, in light of all the recent loss …and near losses Vassenleigh had faced. Centuries of experience did not negate moments of defeat. If anything, those moments seemed to arrive with more frequency, like relentless hounds who had finally caught up to the fox who had eluded them, season after season.

  “Endmark’s distantly sibling city,” continued the voice that had come with Ashwin from indoors, “has fallen to a state of uncertain loss.”

  “What does ‘uncertain loss’ mean?” Ashwin asked, looking over his shoulder as he came to the bottom of the terrace stairs. His hair wrapped the sleeve of his robe with the motion, as a cooling wind stirred across the garden terraces.

  There was moisture in the air, foretelling of a storm that would glide across the plains before the day was out.

  “The troops were routed at Eastmark,” was the answer given to him. “And though the enemy appears to have not claimed the city, the decision was made to pull back to Sarily.”

  The words were delivered by Ceth. Ashwin’s fellow patriarch stood at the top of the stairs in layers of subtly contrasting blue, his short crown of light brown hair scarcely bothered by the atmosphere of the season. He was tidy, efficient, and thorough …one of the persistent factors that would like to anchor Ashwin, and though the man was typically pleasant about it, Ashwin was a wanderer by nature.

  On the thought, he turned from his colleague and proceeded to the nearest bed of lush red flowers kept at the Citadel for the benefit of its residents. Eastmark and its smaller sibling town—held as such only for their shared founding stories, not for their proximity to one another—were both potential tragedies, but at the same time, neither were fully lost yet. And that meant the situations of each could be rectified.

  “Truthfully, the mystery of Endmark bothers me more,” Ashwin eventually said, looking over the blood lilies for signs of new development. His fingertips were starkly white against the deep scarlet coloring the petals displayed.

  “I’ll admit that I’m disturbed by that myself,” Ceth answered. He was younger than Ashwin by a fair amount of years—centuries, in truth. There was only one other at Vassenleigh as old as Ashwin, and that was his twin.

  “Let’s send word to the steward,” Ashwin decided. “We’ve received his letter of concern and we will investigate. It is my hope that we’ll hear of the climate at Feidor’s Crest before long. We know that much of what has gone on in the northern reaches, apart from the situation of war itself, is related.”

  Ceth nodded solemnly.

  Ashwin decided it was important to add, “I also anticipate that, in light of our success at Lilende and the events that followed, there will be retaliation.”

  “It’s been nearly one hundred years since all of this began,” Ceth replied.

  Ashwin invited a deep green dragonfly onto the back of his hand while the statement was made, then deposited the delicate creature onto the nearest lily. He said to Ceth, “I know.”

  •—•

  Feidor’s Crest existed in a fog; a physical one, which descended each night and which the sun could scarcely lift by day, but it was also a thing less tangible. Like a ghost, its presence was better felt than seen. The shadow of war, the grip of depression—maybe one, maybe the other …maybe both. Defining the haze scarcely mattered. Knowing that it existed, and that it imprisoned an entire town, did.

  Thaylen Dunlar held onto the thought while it was his own. Too frequently, thoughts were pulled away from him, lending members of his family to notions of premature senility. ‘Aging by the day’, was the term of choice, delivered with regularity by his eldest. Of course, his youngest was scarcely qualified to deliver a breath most days. Such luxuries were reserved for those unaffected by phantom disease.

  The bitterness of the thought was what carried Thaylen’s gaze from the cloud-topped trees surrounding Feidor’s Crest, and to the bedside of his son, where a physician puzzled over the observable manifestation of a bleak imagination.

  What else could it be, if not a self-imposed oppression? The boy showed no signs of actual illness or injury. He seemed overcome with a debilitation of the mind only, one that had convinced his body of exhaustion so profound that he could not be willed to move most days. He looked at no one, spoke with no one. He breathed; that was the extent of his existence.

  “He is no better, then?” Thaylen said to the physician.

  “No, my lord,” was the response.

  It was as Thaylen anticipated. He accepted the answer with a nod, turning back to the window view.

  Across the grounds, two figures on horseback moved beneath the ill sky, toward the steeple of rock for which the town was named. It was plain that both riders were portraits of health, though one of them flaunted something better than health. One of them brandished the glory of the Malakym; hair as red as new life scoring the air, as if with the blood of some righteous sacrifice to the gods of creation. In appearance, that one was a living testament to what was lost, a banner stuck fast in the ruins of the realm of the gods who had otherwise vanished from their world and taken most of its beauty with them. Their absence did not negate prayer, nor did it blind people to reminder of what had once been, and what was lost. Soon, it would be all of Edrinor, overrun by war and by ghosts, and by a plague of the mind and spirit.

  “We descend into madness,” Thaylen muttered.

  Behind him, he detected the physician looking at him, as if the utterance had caught the man’s attention. Thaylen merely turned from the window, his gaze passing over the man, and over the husk of his own child before he left the room.

  The corridor outside was quiet, as if abandoned by life, but Thaylen knew where to find those who yet breathed naturally and who thought reasonably as if their faculties remained their own. For now, he would count himself among them. He took the rounded tower stairs from the second floor, scarcely pausing at the landing window to look out at the village below his house—what of it could be viewed through the treetops and fog.

  At the base of the stairs, the sounds of the living could be heard. He followed their sounds to the study, where men on his staff and men who served him through various stations in town had gathered.

  “Governor,” his deputy greeted, ensuring that the attention of all in the room would be on Thaylen when he entered.

  Thaylen ignored the greeting, but accepted the attention. “They’ve gone,” he said of the riders he had watched from his son’s bedroom.

  “Do you think that they’ll uncover anything?” the chief constable asked openly. He was a man getting on in his years, similarly to Thaylen. He probably was too old for his position, but Feidor’s Crest had never been much of a center for mayhem before acquiring the interest of a demon.

  “It’s already been revealed,” Thaylen told the man, his mind moving to one of Edrinor’s recent victories against invaders from Morenne. “All has been revealed.”

  “Do you mean about what happened at Lilende?” his deputy asked.

  “They say it was defended by priests of the Vassenleigh Order,” another man commented.

  “There is no one left alive at Vassenleigh,” the deputy governor insisted. While the man was willing to cast an immediate glare of admonishment at his colleague, he seemed not so sure of what he’d stated when his gaze came back to Thaylen.

  Stubbornness was failing all of them where the Kingdom Alliance and its rumored support from priests was concerned. Recent events in their northern territory had pulled from their eyes, blinders they were not even aware they had been wearing. Most of them, anyway.

 
“Don’t be ignorant, Ergen,” Thaylen scolded, making his way to a nearby bench for a needed sit down. He was getting on in years and going out in health. He feared some days that his mind might have been going faster than the rest of him. Still, he knew what he had seen in the pair who had come to Feidor’s Crest. “History has indeed marked the Order dead. As dead as the last king and all of his family. As dead as every soldier overtaken on the battlefields directly north. The battlefields that draw ever nearer. Haddowyn was the start, the doorway through which this current evil gained foothold.”

  “Haddowyn was lost over thirty years ago,” the constable confirmed, allowing Thaylen to appreciate their shared years for at least a moment.

  They had witnessed things together that the younger generations had not. They had witnessed things separately as well. Chief Constable Guidry had been nearer a youth thirty-four years ago, serving beneath the man who had been the chief constable at Haddowyn.

  Thaylen himself had been only his father’s son then. He had been on his way to a meeting with the governor of the very town from which the then young Guidry had just come, having escaped what the constable was stricken beyond explaining or describing in those moments they had first met. It was Guidry’s urgency that turned Thaylen around on the road and ultimately, returned him to Feidor’s Crest with a traumatized refugee in his company.

  And now, decades later, Guidry recognized the symptoms of disease that had preceded Haddowyn’s fall. Moreover, he recognized both of the healthy strangers who had come to Feidor’s Crest. One, like the constable, had been among Haddowyn’s younger residents, maintaining a role beneath the governor. According to Guidry, he was unchanged. The constable said that he knew it was the same person, because he would never forget the red hair of Korsten Brierly.

  The name Brierly happened to be familiar to Thaylen, and he indeed believed that hair so red was unforgettable. Such coloring was in no way typical of the people of Edrinor, though that detail could only be disregarded, for the fact that Thaylen knew the Brierly family was from the south of Edrinor. It seemed reasonable to conclude, then, that this Korsten Brierly was of their own countrymen, but on an unexpected course that could be as easily despised as the enemy.