by A. C. Cobble
If it wasn’t for the discovery of Archtan Atoll’s levitating rocks and the invention of the airships that used them, rail would be the fastest and most efficient way about the country. Instead, it was just the most efficient.
“If you think your mentor is gone,” asked the duke, catching up to Sam, “what are we doing?”
“I’m not sure he’s gone,” she responded. “But if he is, then his killer was here.”
“There are killers everywhere,” muttered Oliver, dodging around a group of scurrying men and women who he suspected were seeing a big city for the first time. “If we had any luck at catching them, we wouldn’t be in Middlebury in the first place.”
Sam shook her head as they reached the end of the platform. “This feels different. If Thotham were after something, he’d be careful, alert. My mentor was not killed by any simple murderer.”
Oliver shrugged. “Where do we start then?”
“The scrying wasn’t specific,” admitted Sam. “I recognized the rail station and the Church. To begin, I suggest we walk between them and see what we see.”
“Should we expect something like what attacked Standish Taft in Swinpool?” wondered Oliver.
“The sorcerer we faced, perhaps, but not the shadow-monster,” replied Sam, stepping out of the archway of the rail station and into the streets of Middlebury. “That thing was a shade — a spirit — dragged out of the underworld. If anything like that killed Thotham, it would have been banished back. There are… On his body, a priest like Thotham may have runes inscribed. Bindings to their soul. Those runes will activate when the soul departs the body. When Thotham dies, his soul will take any other spirits down with it. It’s a safety precaution, of a sort, to minimize the damage if any… any priests like Thotham perish in the line of duty.”
“Do you have markings like that on your body?” wondered Oliver.
She did not reply, and he followed her as she weaved deeper into Middlebury, passing from the noise of the rail station into the hubbub of a busy city. Inns, pubs, and other businesses catering toward travelers faded as they walked down the broad avenues, headed toward the soaring spires of Middlebury’s Church.
“Do you hear that?” wondered Oliver. “I—”
Sam grabbed his arm and jerked him to a stop.
The Priestess XII
“It’s a Grimalkin. Run!” she shouted, grabbing Duke’s arm.
Around the corner bound a giant, sleek, black cat, its shoulders bunched with muscle, its tooth-filled jaw slavered with pink blood-flecked foam. The thing stood shoulder high, and its eyes burned with green fire.
A dozen citizens of Middlebury ran before the beast, some pelting around the corner just in front of it, some seeing it on the street and spinning to flee.
Duke ran toward it.
“Fool,” groaned Sam. Then, she broke into a sprint after him.
The grimalkin swung a paw and batted a man across the street like a house cat toying with a mouse. The man’s panicked cry cut off when his body crashed against the stone wall of a building in a crunch of bone and squelch of pulped flesh.
Duke was charging right toward the thing.
Sam followed in his wake, pulling her kris daggers, hoping the nobleman didn’t get himself killed before she could get there.
The grimalkin leapt after another hapless citizen of Middlebury, covering ten yards in a single bound. It landed lightly and snapped its jaw closed, catching the man’s skull. The beast flicked its head, and the man’s neck audibly snapped. The grimalkin dropped him and looked down the street, where Oliver came flying at it, swinging his broadsword like a berserker.
The blade flashed in the midday sun and bit into the shoulder of the grimalkin. Duke howled in celebration, and the giant cat screeched in pain and rage. It staggered back, jerking Duke’s broadsword from his grip, and then sprang at him, blood-stained teeth clacking where the nobleman had been.
He’d thrown himself onto the cobbles and rolled away. The cat’s paw smacked down after him, barely missing his leg. He kept rolling, and the grimalkin pursued.
Sam flung herself at it, jumping into the air, both her kris daggers swinging forward. One caught the creature in the side, sinking between two ribs, and one caught it in the front, plunging into the grimalkin’s throat. A terrible yowl split the air, threatening to shatter her eardrums, and the cat thrashed against her.
Sam dragged her daggers together, the razor-sharp blades slicing flesh and opening long, jagged wounds in the creature. It struggled, trying to wiggle away from her. She leaned on it with all her weight, pushing against it, knocking the wounded beast down. The giant cat was strong and nearly tossed her, but the ragged cuts quickly took their toll, and the creature’s motion stilled.
She waited until she was sure it was dead and then glanced at the nobleman. She saw wide eyes staring back at her. She asked, “Are you all right?”
He looked down at himself. A wide spray of crimson liquid stained his front. Cursing, he began frantically patting himself before gasping, “I think so. This isn’t mine.”
She stood, trying to still the trembling in her legs, and looked at the dead cat.
“What in the frozen hell is that thing?” asked Duke, stooping to retrieve his broadsword. “Do you think that’s what… what killed Thotham?”
“No, I don’t,” she said. “This is a grimalkin. They’re common in the Darklands, trained and raised from birth to accompany the priests of that place. They function as sentinels and watch the back of the priest as they work.”
“The priest?”
“Sorcerer.”
Duke blinked at her, confused.
“We’ll talk about it later,” she said. “My point was, this cat wasn’t here alone. If it is here, then so is the master.”
“A sorcerer,” groaned Duke. “So, it may not be just one spirit we need to contest with. It could be someone calling a small army of them, and we just lost our advantage of surprise. Can we find reinforcements at the Church?”
Sam shook her head. “There’s no one there who could help us. Thotham and my training is… specialized. Besides, surprise is our best friend right now. This cat is giant, but it is not supernatural. I don’t know of any link between it and its master outside of the normal connection between man and beast. If we hurry, we still have time. Sorcery is a slow art. It takes a while to fashion the patterns and bindings that allow communication with the spirits. If we can find the owner of this cat, I’m guessing we will find who killed Thotham and maybe who is behind everything else we’ve been investigating.”
“Right,” agreed Duke, looking down the street. “Sorcery is a slow art, you said?”
She nodded, doing the best she could to clean her weapons and check her kit. With what they were going after, she would need to be ready.
“If it’s a slow art,” said Duke, “then how did that man in Swinpool call a shadow-monster, or whatever it was, out of thin air in heartbeats?”
“Preparation,” murmured Sam. “It’s a slow art, but if the practitioner has prepared something, they can release it quickly. That scepter was imbued with a spirit, and when it broke, the spirit was released. All the sorcerer had to do was direct it to a target. We were lucky, actually, because the spirit was confined, its direction was narrow. Its bindings only allowed for one target. That was done to protect the sorcerer himself, so the thing wouldn’t turn on him after meeting its primary objective.”
Duke glanced down the street where the grimalkin had appeared from and frowned. Muttering to himself, he said, “A slow art, layers of traps. So, either the sorcerer responsible for this is engaged in another ritual, or perhaps he was injured or killed in the fight with Thotham?”
“Exactly,” said Sam. “The cat proves the master either died or is still in Middlebury. Now is our chance.”
“Lead on, then,” replied Duke.
She moved to slip her daggers into their sheaths then looked between herself and Duke. They were both covered in the
grimalkin’s blood. “You know what, I don’t think we’re going to be able to sneak through Middlebury. If anyone sees us, they’re liable to start screaming anyway. It’s best if we hurry.”
On high-alert now, looking for traps, she started trotting down the street, following the trail of destruction left by the grimalkin. If the sorcerer had the grimalkin on patrol as a sentinel, there could be another one or something even nastier. Would a sorcerer set a sentinel like that, letting the creature loose in the streets? She didn’t think so, but she didn’t know. There was so much she didn’t know. So much she needed to ask her mentor that she couldn’t.
She was so focused on looking for threats she nearly missed the obvious sign. The trail of torn and mutilated bodies ended, and a block later, she saw a bright blue symbol painted on the wall of a building. Sam stopped walking, staring at it. Graffiti, it would appear to be, to anyone who couldn’t read the ancient script.
“What?” asked Duke, gripping his broadsword and glancing nervously at the empty street ahead of them.
“That’s my mentor’s name written in the script of the Darklands,” said Sam. “There can’t be more than a dozen men and women in Enhover’s priesthood who would understand that.”
“And whatever sorcerers are running around,” added Duke grimly.
She frowned. “A sorcerer wouldn’t deface a building with my mentor’s name, would they?”
“You tell me,” replied Duke.
“They wouldn’t,” she concluded. “Thotham himself wrote this. It’s a sign, a sign for us to follow.”
Duke scratched his head. “Follow it where?”
“Down there,” said Sam. She stalked to a cellar door set in the side of the building.
“I think this is a soup kitchen for the poor,” mused Duke. “It looks closed, but doesn’t the Church run these things? I seem to recall my brother mentioning it during one of his lectures. The Crown provides the funding and the Church the hands to do the work?”
“The Church does run them,” agreed Sam distractedly. “More importantly, see the lock on this door? It is broken.”
Duke came to stand beside her. He looked at the symbol above the door, at the broken lock, and then at her.
“Down we go,” she said.
Duke grabbed the edge of one of the cellar doors and glanced around to see who was watching — which was no one because they’d all fled or been injured by the grimalkin. Grunting, he lifted the door up, revealing a dark cavity and a set of wooden stairs.
Sam peered into the gloom. Beyond the first dozen steps, there was nothing visible, only black.
“There,” said Duke, pointing to a bracket just inside the stairwell.
An unused torch sat in it, evidently placed there for… for them? Sam wondered what they were getting into but gestured for Duke to take the brand.
The nobleman collected the torch, and after a moment of staring at it, she removed flint and steel from a pouch on her belt.
“No servants around to light it for you, m’lord?”
He grunted. “I’ll carry it and come behind you so your hands are free. Whatever we find down here, you’re probably better equipped to deal with it than I am.”
She nodded and started into the darkness, Duke following a few steps behind her, the torch bobbing in his hand, lighting her path. Ahead of her, the stairs continued down for two flights then opened to a narrow, stone hallway.
“This is no cellar,” observed Duke from behind.
“Go back and close the door,” instructed Sam. “I’ve got a feeling we won’t want company for what we’re going to find down here.”
He complied, and when he returned with the torch, she led them into the hallway.
“What is this?” he wondered.
“This, I believe, is where Thotham has been,” murmured Sam. “His nest.”
She began to say more, but stopped, and instead kept walking down the narrow, stone corridor. There was no point in sharing her suspicions until they were proven correct or incorrect. Either way, the answers lay at the end of the tunnel.
Ahead of them, a sinister crimson glow lit the end of the pathway.
“If I was a sorcerer, that’s exactly the color of fae light I would choose,” whispered Duke.
“We should be quiet,” she hissed.
He didn’t respond.
She was hurrying, trying to keep her footsteps quiet but unable to resist the urge to increase her pace. In a moment, she was almost running when they cleared the tunnel and entered a wide, circular chamber. It was lit by a single red fae light that hung suspended in the center of the room.
Below the globe of the fae light, there was a waist-high altar. On one side of it, Thotham lay on the floor motionless. Beside the entrance to the room, another man dressed in the garb of the Church’s priests lay obviously dead. Duke cursed and raised his sword, facing something behind the altar, but by the time she circled it, ready to attack, they both realized it was no threat. A grimalkin, a brutal puncture marring its glossy black fur, was also dead.
“What in the frozen hell is this?” questioned Duke, staring around the room.
Sam rushed to the side of her mentor and knelt, putting two fingers against his neck. His eyes fluttered open and he offered a weak smile.
“What happened?” she asked.
“You saw my name outside?” he murmured, his voice barely a whisper. “Good. I was worried you would miss it, but I didn’t have time to come up with anything more elegant. I almost died getting out of the tunnel and back.”
She checked his body, looking for wounds, but she found none. “I don’t understand.”
Speaking slowly, he continued, “I almost died… to grant you what assistance I could.”
“You’re going to have to explain that to me,” said Duke, coming to stand beside her.
Thotham coughed weakly, and she looked around, trying to find water or something to give him.
“That’s unnecessary, girl,” he said. “In a moment, I won’t need it.”
“We thought… We thought you died,” said Sam, her fists closing tightly on the hilts of her daggers. “I scried for you. While we were still connected to the spirit…”
“I know,” rasped Thotham. “I felt it watching me, so I had to act before I was ready.”
“Why?”
“You found me using a spirit of the underworld,” explained Thotham. “That is their domain, not ours. The creature you ensnared was under your control for the moment, but you are not its master. There has been a change in the underworld, an accession of sorts. Ca-Mi-He has grown powerful, more powerful than I ever expected. Everything that spirit saw, everything it learned from you, in time, Ca-Mi-He would also know. My location, what I’ve been doing here… I tried to act quickly, but I wasn’t quick enough. I severed the connection, banishing your spirit, and I’ve been scrambling to finish my work since then. That man over there found me before I could. We fought, and I won, but it was a close thing. Much of my strength was already gone.”
“Was already gone?” questioned Sam.
“The spear on the altar,” instructed Thotham. “Get it.”
Duke moved to pick up the weapon and brought it back to Sam and her mentor.
She gasped when she saw it close. It was Thotham’s spear, the same one he’d carried with him ever since she’d known him, but it was different. All along the shaft, it was inscribed with fresh runes. From end to end, tiny symbols had been carved shallowly into the weapon.
“I don’t… I don’t know what these mean,” she admitted, peering closely at the compact script.
“They’re me. My life,” replied Thotham.
She looked at him, uncertain.
“I’ve imbued the spear with a part of me,” explained the man. “I bound my spirit to it, but moments before the last of the ritual, I was attacked. I could not finish.”
“You bound it to yourself so your spirit will not travel to the underworld when your life ends? Why would you
do this?” demanded Sam.
Her mentor shifted, and she helped him to sit.
“The enemy knows who I am,” he said. “With the rise of Ca-Mi-He, they control the underworld and everything in it. My time is short, Sam. I am sick. Within the next year, maybe two, I would die no matter what happens. When I pass, I will fall under their power. I will be a creature in that dark place, just like any other, until time grinds me down, and I’m reborn again here. A spirit, just like any other, except they know me. When I die, they’ll find me and use me. They’ll use me against you, Sam. Against the Church. Against Enhover. The world.”
“Who will use you?” gasped Duke.
“That is what you two were meant to find out,” remarked Thotham, his eyelids fluttering heavily. “I know little of our enemy. I only know what they do. The two-decade long blight in Northundon, the murders, the ascension of Ca-Mi-He… I can see the results of their labor, but who are they… Until we know, we cannot fight them. The murder of the countess was an error, the first one they’ve made. She made contact with Ca-Mi-He somehow, and the spirit gave her a blessing. She tried to capitalize on it, but they found out. Our true enemies found out and killed her.”
“B-but…” stammered Sam.
“The countess was a sorceress, that is true,” acknowledged Thotham, breaking into a coughing fit before continuing, “but she was an amateur, little better than the practitioners of midnight rituals in the secret societies. Somehow, she got close to something she shouldn’t have, close to real power, and I believe they killed her for it. They left clues. The door is open for us to track them. Countess Dalyrimple’s death has set off a series of events that I believe are our opportunity. It’s the chance I’ve been waiting over twenty years for, ever since the prophecy... This is what I’ve trained you for, Sam. You and the duke are the ones who can follow this trail that I saw so long ago. Find out where it leads and who is at the end of it. I meant to give you one last gift, girl. I meant to bind myself to the weapon so that you’d have my strength when the time came.”