“Didn’t know who could create buildings?” Abagail asked.
“The darklings. I didn’t know they could make a building out of darkling wyrd.” Skye turned to her then and noticed the fear traced over her face. “It will be okay. I feel it pushing against my wyrd too. We can’t give in to it.”
He took her hand, and though it didn’t chase away all the worry she felt staring at the building, it helped to know that he was there, going through it with her.
“Get up,” the guard ordered Rorick. The burly man jabbed Rorick in the ribs with the hilt of his spear. “On your feet, you’re next.”
Rorick opened his eyes to the near-empty barn. For a moment, he couldn’t get his bearings, and then the memory hit him. One by one the people had been taken from the barn, never to return. He wasn’t sure how he’d been able to sleep through some of it. The memory of children weeping while they were torn from their mother’s grip was a sound he didn’t think he’d ever be able to purge from his mind. One after another, prisoners were forced to the ground, some invisible wyrd controlling them, forcing them to kneel before Fen or some other harbinger of darkness where they’d be marked with the shadow plague, and then led from the barn.
He couldn’t let that happen to him. Rorick struggled against his bonds.
“Really, you’re going to do this?” a female dark elf beside the guard asked. She gave a wry smile and opened the leather book she was holding. “You know it’s not going to help. You’ve seen the people before you try to fight.”
One person. He’d seen one person try to fight it. That’s all it took. The guards and the elves didn’t even bother trying to struggle with the prisoner. They’d been gutted where they stood; the prisoners guts torn from their belly. For days their intestines hung from the center of the barn, a reminder to all of what happened if they resisted the infection of darkling wyrd.
“You can come with us of your own free will, or you can end up as another example,” the elf told him.
The smell was one that would likely never leave the barn. Even thinking about that moment brought the fetid smell of human guts and intestinal gasses back to Rorick. He gagged remembering the way the stomach hung from the ceiling, dripping out the remains of some previous meal; the intestines knotted and bloated from decay.
Rorick slumped against his shackles, defeat settling in his limbs like malaise. He was barely aware of the guard coming closer, unlocking his shackles, and then tugging him to his feet. Rorick was fixed with a chain that bound his collar to his wrists and then led out of the barn and into the gloomy afternoon. There was a storm brewing on the horizon and all around him the air was heavy with a preternatural darkness.
The blood and destruction had been cleaned up for as far as Rorick could see. Even down in Haven he could see the fires had long burned out and the buildings that had suffered attack had been torn down and leveled. While there was a lot of bare spaces and blackened ground, there was little other indication of a struggle just days before.
Fog hung over the city, dark and foreboding. Rorick trembled at the feeling within the fog, as if the mist bore eyes that always watched, always judged what one was doing. The darkness clouded the streets all around him, hanging heavy in the air and dulling the cries of anguish and pain to a mere whisper. Though he couldn’t see it there was a sense that everything had changed. Even though New Landanten bore no signs of struggle, there was a sense that nothing would ever be the same again.
“Move it,” the guard nudged him in the back, prodding him forward even as another guard tugged on his chains and led Rorick down the main street of New Landanten. He kept his eyes on his feet, not wanting to see the hopeless faces of humans he’d stood guard beside, or of elves—both light and dark—that he’d shared drinks with around fires lining the streets of New Landanten. He didn’t think he’d want to see the shattered, hopeless look in their eyes as they were led to their own fates, much like he was.
He was steered to a tall building, and then pulled to a stop outside its open doors. He recognized this as the main hall where official elven business was attended to. Recently it saw Garth going into the light. The white marble walls, shot through with veins of gold, rose high into the darkened fog. High above a stained glass roof had been opened up so that those inside could see the sky above.
Rorick was pushed through the open wooden doors and down a short hall and into an atrium. Around him, greenery thrived, like he was in the middle of a jungle rather than a city. Short, potted trees stood around the walls. Between the trees and the aisle there were numerous plants that Rorick couldn’t name. They all added a heady perfume to the chilly air within the hall.
His eyes traveled easily to the far wall. On a dais sat a plain wooden chair, but the thin, dark-haired man who sat on it made the chair look like a throne.
“Fen,” Rorick rumbled. He struggled against his bonds, forgetting the warning the elf had given him in the barn. The point of the guard’s spear stabbed him in the side and Rorick cried out. His knees buckled and he crumpled to the floor.
“Bring him forward,” Fen said, motioning to the guard.
The guard pulled Rorick to his feet, but he didn’t need any help crossing the hall to Fen; he was urged on by his anger. Here sat a man who had been friends with Rowan. The man who had welcomed them to Haven with open arms, promising them care and safety. If it was the last thing he did, Rorick intended to see Fen dead by his own hands.
For a moment Rorick forgot that he was shackled. When he was close enough to Fen, he leapt for him, but he didn’t make it far. As he took to the air, the guard pulled back on his leash. Rorick tumbled backwards through the air and slammed into the floor. The jar sent a shock through the wound in his side. His head banged against the floor. The room spun around him dizzyingly.
Fen smiled. “It’s good to see you’re ruled by anger. There’s little doubt that you could easily be turned into a darkling.”
“I would sooner die than serve the darkling gods,” Rorick spat, and struggled to his feet.
“Well, that helps us too,” Fen said cheerily. The darkling made a motion to the guards, and Rorick was pushed down into a chair he hadn’t seen before. There were no physical bonds that held him in place against the chair, but something wrapped around him. It was invisible, most likely wyrd he reasoned, but it held him in place all the same. He struggled against it, but the more he moved, the tighter the hold became until he was sure that the force of the wyrd would soon crush his bones if he wasn’t careful.
As Rorick calmed, Fen drew near. He tugged his long green jacket into place and sighed.
“Well, now, saving the best for last,” Fen said. His boots rung hollowly through the atrium as he paced before Rorick. “It’s really quite simple. Today you become infected. You have several days to decide how your life is going to go from there. Either you join us,” Fen held up one hand as if offering him a reasonable option. “Or you die. Either way, we win. You can join our forces or you can die to open the scepters.”
“Kill me now and use my blood to open the scepters. I will never join you.”
“Well, no need to be hasty,” Fen said. “Everyone is given a choice. However, I will say we’ve opened a lot of scepters today.”
Fen removed his glove and held his blackened hand before Rorick. The shadows of his plague stirred on his hand, eddying and swirling like fog, or ink dropped in water.
“This won’t hurt at all,” Fen said. “Though I’m sure you will want to scream or whatever.”
The guard dropped his spear with a clatter. Rorick startled at the noise. The wyrd closed tighter around him, making it hard to breathe. The guard tore open Rorick’s shirt, baring his chest to Fen. Fen bent closer, a smile on his lips. His hand dipped toward Rorick’s chest, the shadows stirred on his palm. They whirled more and more the closer his plagued hand came to the uninfected flesh of Rorick’s chest.
Fen slapped his hand against Rorick’s chest and the shadows swirled, and lurched
onto Rorick’s skin.
Rorick grunted against the cold feel of the darkling tide rushing over his skin like a splash of wintery water. As the power rushed over his body, his vision clouded. The atrium faded from view. He stood once more in the kitchen of his old home. His parents, dead, were laid out on the floor by the kitchen table. Their eyes stared up at nothing, but it was almost as if their gaze were directing Rorick to where their attacker lurked. He could hear the darkling creaking the floorboards of the room above him as it ambled around his bedroom.
He raced for the stairs, taking them two at a time. He didn’t know what he was going to do when he got to the darkling, but he couldn’t stand there and stare at his parents and not do anything. But when he reached the top of the stairs and swung left into his room, the shadow was gone.
Rorick dropped onto his bed, his head fell into his hands. Tears burned his cheeks. In the matter of a couple seconds, his entire world had changed. He couldn’t get the look of his mother’s face out of his mind. He didn’t know if he would ever be able to erase that last image of the woman who’d been so strong, who’d he talked to just hours before, now prone on the floor of their kitchen. His mother, who’d never let any kind of illness stop her from her regular life, now lifeless and unmoving.
The tears flowed down his face unbidden. There was no stopping the tide. Rorick had cried before, but this was different. These weren’t tears of pain, or of loss, or of fear; these were all of those tied up in one. He wasn’t a man now. Rorick was a child who didn’t know how to make it in a world without his mother.
But then the shadow was back. This hadn’t happened when he’d lost his parents. The shadow hadn’t come back, but this time it did. It was before him, and before Rorick could respond, the shadow stepped into his body. Rorick grunted feeling the shadow course through his body, infecting every fiber of his being. He was one with the shadow, he was infected with the same power that had ended the life he’d known so many months ago.
“No,” Rorick whimpered.
Fen removed his hand with a sigh and a shrug. “Afraid so,” he chimed in, pulling his glove back into place before he ascended the stairs to his throne. “Take him away to the others.”
The wyrd released him, but it might as well have held him in place for all that Rorick could do to stand just then. Tears flowed down his face as the shadow delved into those painful moments from so long ago. Rorick thought he’d put it behind him; thought that he was finally healing from the loss of his parents. But just like that, it all came swimming to the surface again. He hadn’t healed at all; he’d merely learned how to live with the loss.
There was no point left for him. There was no reason to try fighting or working against the darkling tide. Here in this place that he was supposed to be the safest, he was in the middle of danger he thought he’d never be part of. Was there any place safe in all of the nine worlds any longer?
He was being led out the back of the atrium and down a darkened hall that he knew, somehow, was leading him down into the earth. The darkness of the hall mirrored the darkness he felt swimming within him now.
The web of darkling wyrd wove its way over the memory of his mother’s pristine face. It aged her. She wasn’t a young woman, but Rorick had never thought of her as old until he’d seen the darkling wyrd that filled in the cracks of her laugh lines. When he knew that more darkling than human was within his parents, only then did Rorick burn the house down.
He was tugged out of his memories and to a stop. He’d been led to the end of the hall. Over the shoulder of the dark elf before him Rorick could see an earthen chamber so long he couldn’t see the other end. It smelled of dirty flesh and human waste. The smell was enough to make him gag, but not nearly as bad as the smell of the intestines from the barn.
Along both walls wooden cells hung from the ceiling. The cells were packed with so many people that Rorick was sure they would have to sleep in shifts so there would be enough room for them to lie down.
At the base of the hall, across from the room from the doorway there was a long wooden table. Three dark elves sat behind it, their gray skin lined with age, their dark hair pulled away from their faces. It was hard for Rorick to tell if they were male or female. They were talking amongst themselves.
As they approached, the dark elf at the end of the table closest to the cells rose, a ring of keys clasped in his hand. He led the guards and Rorick down the central hallway amongst the shifting cells that swayed whenever someone inside moved. The ropes that held the cells to the ceiling creaked with protest. Hard-packed dirt beneath his feet formed the floor. Overhead roots and rocks protruding from the ceiling could be seen glittering in the faint torchlight. Large wooden beams had been fixed along the ceiling to bear the weight of the cells.
Rorick was pulled to a stop as the dark elf with the keys opened a door. The guards unshackled Rorick and they hoisted him up into the cell as if he weighed nothing. He fell against the floor when they tossed him in. The rope above moaned in protest and the cell shivered. The door slammed shut behind him and was locked once more.
It was a small cell, but there was only one other person in there with him.
“Rorick?” Gil asked. When Rorick’s eyes adjusted to the light he could see the bruised and battered face of the only person he knew here among all the strangers. “What are we going to do?”
Rorick didn’t answer. He righted himself and rubbed his aching wrists. He scooted back against the wooden rails of the wall, his thoughts miles away.
What would Abbie do? He wondered.
“You might have to use your wyrd,” Skye said. He didn’t turn from his inspection of the black pyramid, but his hand still held tight to Abagail’s.
Abagail knew the feeling, the same thoughts that were going through Skye’s mind were going through hers. She couldn’t tear her eyes from the blackened edifice. It seemed a place where all hope and all joy went to die. The pyramid darkened the snow around it in such a way that seemed less like it cast a shadow and more like it was drinking in all the life and light from what lay around it. They had been inspecting the monolith for some time now.
They’d seen the figures that created shadows in the fog that wreathed the base of the pyramid. Skeletons like Abagail had fought when she fled from Muspelheim. Most of the skeletons were bare bones, without clothing or weapons, but a few of them looked to be warriors risen from the grave they’d taken to in ages past. Their gray bones sported armor that they’d been buried with, their hands clung to the weapons they’d been proficient with in life. Wherever Abagail saw armor and weapon, she couldn’t help notice the rust and tarnish that had marred the surface.
“Are they guards?” Abagail asked Skye.
“It looks like,” he said. Even the skeletons that didn’t carry swords carried weapons of a sort mostly wooden clubs or bones or daggers they could use to bludgeon or stab their victims with.
Abagail saw a figure, robed in shadows, drifting through the ranks of skeletons like a shadow lurking through trees. If she hadn’t seen the deathly white face and the bone-like fingers more than once, she would have thought it was nothing more than a cloud of darkness. It oozed a malignant wyrd the likes Abagail had never felt before. If this was a darkling, Abagail thought it was of a higher rank. It reminded her of the ballicrie, but darker as if it were a perversion, a shade of that warrior angel of death.
She knew without a doubt that this darkling was the reason the skeletons were here. The skeletons weren’t darklings, that much Abagail could tell, but they were animated by darkling wyrd, pulled from their earthly tombs and infused with the will of the darkling master.
Now that Abagail noticed this, she could see a nimbus of green wyrd that could barely be seen unless Abagail knew what to look for.
“If we take out the darkling, I think all of the skeletons will fall,” Skye told her. He glanced at Abagail as if he might be able to read her thoughts.
“Yes. That one does seem in control of the skeleton
s. I would say we should try slipping around him, but we just don’t know what’s inside. It would be terrible if he controlled things inside as well, or was alerted to our presence once we slipped inside and sent his army after us.” Abagail watched the skeletons march here and there. She’d been watching them long enough to realize they kept to a certain pattern, as if they had specific routes they had to guard.
“Likely there’s going to be more of the same inside as there is outside. We’ve already encountered the wolves,” Skye said. “The snow snakes could be inside, if it’s cold enough. My guess is there’s going to be more animated skeletons and corpses inside.”
Abagail shivered at the thought, remembering how the dead bodies looked when she’d fought them in Muspelheim. “And whatever darklings have come through the portal now that darklings are able to roam through Eget Row so easily.” Abagail bit at the edge of her lip wondering what waited for them on the other side of the portal since it was no longer guarded by Heimdall. If we even make it that far, she reminded herself.
The thought didn’t help to ease her worry.
“What do you want to do?” Skye asked. “Do you want to strike him from here, or do you want to sneak up on him?”
The dark robed figure came back into view from around the opposite edge from where he’d vanished some time before. From the amount of time it took him to come into view, it was likely he was making an entire circuit around the pyramid.
Seeing the darkling again reminded her of just how powerful he felt. She didn’t think any kind of attack from this far away would harm the darkling…most likely it would just alert him to their presence. If he isn’t already aware. In a field of skeletons, living wyrd must stand out like a beacon.
“Are you able to carry me in orb form?” Abagail asked.
“Yes,” Skye nodded. “Each time I’m within the light, it helps heal me. I’m strong enough now to carry you if need calls for it.”
The Call of Winter (The Harbingers of Light Book 6) Page 8