A loud crack split the air as a dark leg plunged through the door. Ragged splinters hit the wall. Walter gasped, dug deep and embraced the fury of the Dragon. It was like pulling a weed from the bottom of the bog, roots buried in pounds of fermented ginger. The leg wriggled out, arm reaching in and unlatching the lock with startling precision. The fingers were black talons, shimmering like obsidian.
“Shit!” Walter leaped up onto trembling legs, cold sweat sprouting from his skin. Not this. Not now. Not here.
Thalia was on her feet, a broad dagger in her hand, held in an overhand grip. Where had she found that?
Vanya turned to the wall, eying a set of spears standing in a bucket carved to look like clouds. There were weapons all around, he realized. Swords mounted on the wall, a pair of boleadoras sitting on an end table, dagger between fruit in a basket.
“Who are you?” Walter stammered. “Show yourself!” he shouted, getting his mind into battle mode. It couldn’t be him, couldn’t be, he told himself. His gut wound hammered, re-opened and wet with blood. He stepped forward, putting himself in front of the women. Had he been found?
The figure pushed through the door, shadows swirling around a towering form, melting and reforming like liquid. A tattered blood-red cape hung in the air behind it, drifting as if weightless. “You know who I am, boy.” Asebor planted his spiked boots, eyes glowing with violet fire.
His mind couldn’t comprehend it. Questions flashed like lightning. Scab? The women’s superstitions came true?
“What do you want? Have you come to die?” Walter felt the strength of his body returning, the numbing effect of the alcohol vaporizing in his mind. His threats felt empty.
“Give me the Chains of the North and I will let you live,” Asebor demanded, hand outstretched.
“Never!” Thalia yelled, her forearm muscles wriggling with tension.
“We don’t have them,” Vanya said at the same time.
Music from the fire seemed to grow louder, reaching through windows. There was something different about Asebor. What, Walter couldn’t say. “I have them,” he said with violence hanging on his breath. “If you want them, you’ll have to take them from me.”
The shadows encasing Asebor’s head shimmered, split in half across his eyes. The two halves peeled apart like an eyeball, whickering over his head and under his chin. There was an incongruously large wolf's head behind the shadowed mask, growling murder. Its eyes glowed with the same violet, giant mouth hanging open, black tongue lolling.
Walter took a step forward, closer towards his nemesis and into the gauntlet posed by crippling fear. What was different about Asebor struck him then. There were no chains. Asebor had always had chains that moved like vipers. This was not Asebor. “Come on, then,” Walter beckoned, sitting back into a fighting stance.
“Give him what he wants!” Thalia hissed at him.
“No! You’ll get nothing from us, you’ll have to kill us all!” Vanya croaked, jabbing a spear at the air.
“You pathetic mortals!” Asebor boomed, his voice ethereal. “Give me Bonesnapper now and I won’t slaughter every single living thing in the Great Tree.”
Walter folded his arms, puffed out his chest, and smiled. This was certainly not Asebor.
“Now!” Asebor screamed, gesturing with clacking talons. “Your defiance will be re-paid with a lifetime of torture.”
“Walter. What are you—?” Thalia’s words faded as his world narrowed down. There was nothing else, no one else but him and this creature purporting to be the demon god.
He was the dominant power here, he knew. If it had been Asebor, he wouldn’t have wasted this much time with words. Asebor’s preferred communication medium was pain. And he wouldn’t have entered the room through a door. Walter thrust his arm out, flicked his fingers and blasted Asebor with air.
Asebor’s form folded up like crumpled paper, tumbling backwards through the antechamber and into the opposite room. Walter surged after him, legs filled with the strength of the Dragon. Asebor rose onto his elbows, rubbed his wolfish head, his form shimmering like a mirage in Helm’s Reach. His body flickered from its true form for a second, a chrome headed Metamorphose.
He gritted his teeth, the fire from his eye glowing. “Knew we were being followed.” He grunted, sending a fireball into its tiny leg, shearing it clean off at the hip. Blood and burning bones skipped across the padded floor. The form of Asebor vanished entirely, replaced with the Metamorphose’s shrilly screams. The Metamorphose was squat and lightly armored, its head a silvery reflective orb.
Footsteps padded in behind him and held his stump up to stop them. He marched over to the bastard, his hand pinning it around the neck. “Asebor, eh? Don’t look much like him to me.” Walter pressed into the creature, putting all his weight on its neck.
The Metamorphose squirmed. Its tiny boyish hands weakly pried at his, crushing down around its neck. “Who are you?” he barked. “Where is Asebor? How did you get here?”
The creature gibbered in its Death Spawn tongue, unintelligible. It’s wriggling grew weaker, the stomping heel going limp. The hammering of its arteries under Walter’s hand grew tired, his thigh warm and sticky with its black blood. It was losing too much blood and would soon be dead. He released his grip from around its neck, thought maybe there’d be something to glean from it if it could speak.
“But you can speak,” he thought out loud. “If you make yourself human.” He tugged on the Phoenix, stump glowing with a disc of blue light. He touched it to the Metamorphose’s leg, but it only burned and smoked on its flesh. The creature shrieked under its helm, writhing renewed. He settled down onto his knees beside it with a sigh, staring it up and down. “Hm. Phoenix doesn’t work on you, but hurts you…”
The women filled in around him. The Death Spawn’s flailing settled down, breathing going shallow. Vanya was nervously gripping the spear, gave the creature a soft jab with the point and dinging off its armor. Its breath caught in a last token resistance.
“What is it?” Thalia asked, her tongue running hurried circles around her lips.
“We should kill it, give it mercy,” Vanya said.
Walter almost laughed, but snorted instead. There was a time when he might have held some sense of pity for them. Cutting down Death Spawn was no different than chopping wood. “Death Spawn,” Walter said, resigned. He eyed a chair, stumbled over to it and slumped into its surprisingly soft confines.
“This is no Death Spawn. We saw Death Spawn today, not like this, no.” Vanya jabbed it again with her spear. It growled and Vanya cried out. It caught the spear, its hand clawing for her face.
Before Walter could stand, Thalia sank to the floor. He was up, saw her dagger sliding under its neck. She wordlessly extracted the blade, blood whispering from its wound. “A different kind of Death Spawn?” Thalia asked him, steadying her breath, shoulders heaving.
Walter’s heart relaxed a few beats. “You alright?”
“Fine,” Thalia said and stared at her hands, rimmed with wet.
“There could be others. How do we find them?” Vanya asked, leaning on the upturned spear.
“How did it get here?” Thalia asked. She dropped the knife beside the Metamorphose, thought better of it and kicked it away. The dagger spun across the floor, leaving scarlet arcs behind. Someone had lit the torches, but Walter missed it. She flicked blood from her hands and found a cloth. She started vigorously rubbing her hands. “It won’t come out,” she muttered.
There were too many questions. Walter found the chair again, sat on its edge. Adrenalin faded from his body, gut pain and deep fatigued returning with a vengeance. He rubbed his temples. “You’ll need water, a lot of it. Blood’s unusually thick. Not like ours.”
“Water,” Thalia repeated. She found a mug, inverted it over her hand and scrubbed. “It’s not coming out,” she said frantically.
Walter watched the blood pool around the base of the Metamorphose’s neck. “Sorry about all the mess.”
<
br /> Vanya shot him a worried look, found another cloth and started helping Thalia clean her hands.
“We need to leave tomorrow.” Walter stared into the ruby disc under the Metamorphose’s neck. His eye went wide at the shapes flitting within the blood. Shadows clawed at its spherical edges, trapped in a bloody prison. Giant mouths with teeth sharpened to points bit at the curving wall. Something struck his neck. Walter winced and jumped from the chair.
“What is it?” Thalia said, spinning to face him.
His neck burned as if someone had placed a coal onto the back of it. His fingers reached for the pain, brushed at the incredible heat, burning fingertips. “Damn it!” he yelled.
“I don’t understand,” Vanya said, scanning around and leveling her spear.
“What can we do?” Thalia peered at him, wringing her hands.
“I will have you back,” the voice of the Shadow god echoed in his head. “You do not belong there.”
Walter marched to a bed, ripped a blanket free from it, threw it over the Metamorphose’s body.
“Walter! Something on your neck… it glows,” Vanya said, her face pallid.
“I know.” He gritted his teeth, waiting for the burning to subside. No amount of healing would touch its pain. His hand formed a tight fist. He had to wait, suffering in silence. The ember-like glow of the figure-eight scar on the back of his neck faded with the covered blood. It only happened with the blood of Death Spawn. It was like a portal, a conduit to the Shadow Realm. Thankfully it seemed the demons couldn’t pass through it. It was as if the demonic blood offered them a window to this realm. At first, he thought it was a hallucination, but after seeing it a few times now, he knew it was very real. “We’ll need your help,” he finally managed. “If you could offer any.”
Thalia stepped towards him, a pace away, bloody rag tucked into the top of her skirt. “What do you need?”
“An army,” Walter scoffed, not at her, but the near impossibility of the request.
“For?” Thalia crossed her arms and kicked out a hip.
“Taking back the Silver Tower, ending the demon god.” And what that entailed, Walter could only guess.
Her lips pressed into a white line. “I have no army.” She shook her head, tugged her headdress off and laid it on the bed. Her hair was long he thought, coiled up into a voluminous bun. “I have about two hundred fighters a few casualties today. If it weren’t for you, well, we’ll go with you.”
“They will? Wait. You’ll come too?”
“I will, and they will follow me,” she said resolutely.
A bit of his overwhelming fatigue relented. “You will?” he asked again, thinking maybe he heard her wrong.
“We will help you take back the Silver Tower. I think I understand its importance now,” she said it softly, smiling at him.
“Should I tell the War Chiefs?” Vanya asked, her eyes like shadowy pits in the torchlight.
“Tell them we march at dawn,” Thalia said, turning from Walter and approaching Vanya. She placed her hands on the frail woman’s shoulders. “You will rule the Great Retreat in my stead.”
“I—” Vanya’s mouth hung open.
“You’ve trained for this. Don’t worry, it won’t be long.”
“Yes.” Vanya swallowed and gave a curt nod. “I’ll be off then.” She opened the ragged remains of the door and padded away.
“I should go and rest now. I’ll tell the guards what happened?” Walter asked, rubbing the back of his neck, fingers tracing the figure-eight.
“No need,” Thalia waved away the notion. “Vanya is likely on her way to them.” She walked towards him, hips swaying, eyes narrowed with that predatory look. “You can stay here.” She reached out and he gently, somewhat reluctantly, caught her wrist.
“No,” Walter said. “I can’t.” He eyed her hand, fingernails ringed with Death Spawn blood. Even after everything that had transpired, she still wanted to bed him. “There’s someone else.” He smiled awkwardly.
She wrapped her other hand around the back of his neck. “She doesn’t have to know. My lips are quiet…” She tried to press closer, but he stopped her with his stump.
“I would know.” He met her eyes, flashing with a wince as if in pain.
“This is only dancing, but closer,” she whispered.
“Sorry,” he freed himself from her hands. “You’re beautiful, stunning really. I just… couldn’t do it to Nyset.”
“Nyset?”
“My other, she waits for me.”
“Very well,” she said coolly. Thalia folded her arms over her breasts. She cleared her throat, turned her back to him. “We march at dawn then.”
Walter nodded at her back. “At dawn. Good night.”
Chapter 16
Traveling
“When you discover new places, they become part of you.” -The Diaries of Nyset Camfield
A cool breeze coursed over the bog, making the seed pods dangling from oversized ferns sway like hanged men. Walter and Grimbald were at the bog’s muddy edge, where they had come in yesterday. It was the spot where Scab had joyfully smiled at Walter, turned, and left them all to die. He had sentenced them to watery graves for marks.
It was sad, Walter thought. Some people’s lives were so empty that they thought marks could eventually fill in that mighty void. He was starting to realize that nothing could fill that empty spot in men. It was always there, haunting during those few moments before drifting off to sleep. Those moments where you were forced to turn inward, meeting the burning eye of your demons up close. The sun would rise again, though, providing new light until sleep loomed again.
“Grim? There’s something I need to do.” Walter turned to him, saw him securing a latch on the pouch of his Blood Donkey. He heaved out a sigh. When this was over, when all of Asebor’s blood and the blood of every Death Spawn beast darkened the earth below his boots, he would spend a month doing nothing but sleeping and eating. He hoped that the only reason he would ever feel this exhausted again was due to spending too much time in bed with Nyset.
“Yeah?” Grimbald said laconically. Walter saw he had the Death Spawn dagger they had removed from his ribs yesterday tucked into his belt. It had grisly spikes along the guard, making punching with it particularly nasty.
“I’m going to go on ahead of you and the soldiers. I need to see Nyset, I can’t wait any longer,” Walter said, bracing himself for some sort of resistance from him.
Grimbald frowned. “I understand, Walt. That’s alright, got Elora to keep me company.”
“Elora?”
Grimbald chuckled. “We had a nice night, slept very little.” He bobbed his eyebrows up and down a few times, a grin crawling up his cheeks.
“I see,” Walter snickered. “So that’s her name. She’s… a fighter then?”
“Mhm. A fighter indeed.” He turned around, jerked the leather armor around his back down to expose some skin, showing fresh scratches. “What happened with you and Thalia?”
“Nothing.” Walter shrugged.
“Nothing?” Grimbald rubbed the donkey’s neck. “She sure had eyes for you, that she did.” He laughed, then burped. “Ugh. Ginger tonic still rumbling around in my belly. Think it’s gonna burn a hole through it by the end of the day.”
“She is pleasing to the eyes, but I couldn’t do it, my friend. All I could think about was Nyset.”
“Huh. What about Kez? Aren’t you going to ride him? Might need a saddle if you’re planning on heading off so soon.” Grimbald pointed over his shoulder using his thumb, directed at the horse.
Walter turned to Kez with a wry smile, watched him drink from a long wooden trough between two mares. There was a great section of land cleared out along the bog with stables for at least fifty horses. He had somehow missed it yesterday, likely from his focus being on more critical matters. “No, going to try using portals to get to her. Think it will be good practice too. Could always use more practice with the powers. Phoenix is less exhausting
than the Dragon at least.”
“Portals.” Grimbald chewed on the word. “Aren’t those dangerous for long distance travel? And shouldn’t you be resting?”
“They are, haven’t had any problems so far, though…” Walter saw half of his billowy black shirt hung out the top of his pants, the other half tucked in. He sort of liked it like that. He brushed his stump against Stormcaller.
To his annoyance, some of the Elders who studied artifacts had taken it for investigation when Vanya nursed him. They had returned it to him this morning. They hadn’t told him anything he didn’t already know, though, that it was indestructible and only responded to men who were touched by the Dragon. After having it back, he was glad others had a chance to look at it. Its existence needed to be recorded in the histories, Vanya told him.
“You’re right, though,” Walter sniffed, sucking back the mucus burrowing down his throat. “I want to rest, should rest, but I need to push myself. Need to get comfortable with being uncomfortable. It will only be a matter of time until we fight the real Asebor again. Need to get stronger with the Dragon too.”
“There has to be a better way to detect those shape-shifting Death Spawn.” Grimbald flicked a black fly feasting on his scalp.
“Yeah. Maybe Nyset has an idea. I don’t know. I’ll try to remember to ask her.” Walter trailed off, his attention grabbed by motion on the Great Tree.
Figures streamed down from the bridges winding around the astonishing girth of the Great Tree. They looked like termites emerging from a disturbed nest. Bright spots of color stood out against the browns and greens of the tree. They made no attempt at camouflage, much like the Midgaard Falcon with their absurd red plumes.
“Still can’t believe he betrayed us,” Grimbald muttered.
“Thinking of Scab too?”
“Was almost starting to like the smelly bastard,” Grimbald said. “Made us elixir, good sausages even. Surprising more than anything else. It’s good you’re practically an army on your own,” he said with what might have been a touch of scorn. “Otherwise, we’d be one with the bog, as the Tree Folk say.”
A New Light (The Age of Dawn Book 5) Page 34