Curse of the Daemon Beast

by Francis James Blair

  She also checked both weapons to make sure nothing had jammed or broken during the climb. Luck was with her, and everything looked in apple pie order.

  And that was it. She was as ready as she could hope to be. Only thing left was the actual fighting.

  It wasn’t long until dawn now. Already the smaller moon Ayne had slipped halfway over the horizon, its twin Estwood rushing to join it. As Temperance moved with careful steps towards the caves, the eastern sky tinged to the lightest of gray, tendrils of light pushing their way along the mountain peaks.

  In one cave to her right, a shadow rose and separated from the waning darkness. Temperance watched it weave its way across the bare ground. The shadow rippled and took form as it approached. First appeared the glowing red eyes, then the shape of massive paws. Long nose pulled back to an angry snarl, and the tendrils snaking from its back whipped about, their cracks and snaps harsh in the ghostly quiet. She could just make out the brand, letting off an occasional pulse that rippled in the air above. Already the appendages looked healed from the battle earlier.

  There you are. No running this time.

  The wolf let out one of its daemonic howls, the sound echoing in the dark as if a dozen more surrounded her. Temperance resisted the urge to glance around, keeping her eyes focused ahead.

  Without warning the creature blurred, darting to the right almost too fast to follow. Temperance twisted, loosing a shot from her revolver with a shout of “Avesa!”

  The bullet twined through the air, leaving rust-colored streaks in its wake. It landed in front of the wolf, sinking in among the dirt and moss. The surrounding ground gave a shudder, then rose upward with the force of a geyser, creating a circular hill a few feet taller than Temperance.

  The beast, unable to slow down or change directions in time, slammed into the hill, sending great clods of dirt into the air. It regained its feet, swaying unsteadily as pieces of hillside continued to rain down upon it.

  Temperance didn’t give it time to recover. She called out “Estalia Vos!” twice in quick succession, launching a pair of silver spikes before taking off running herself.

  The wolf batted the rod out of the air, then let out a yelp of surprise as the second one punched through its shoulder. Temperance snapped her revolver open, dumped the spent casings, and loaded a third spike. Then she was off running again.

  She heard the beast behind, loping over the plateau, eating up the space between them with each monstrous stride. Even with her heart pounding fast and furious against her ribcage, Temperance didn’t dare waste the time to check over her shoulder. She ran on, until the wolf’s labored breath pressed against her ear.

  “Avesa!” Another mound burst from the soil in front of her. Temperance traced a pattern across her jacket. The leather struck the ground a half-second before she reached the hill, sending her over and beyond it.

  The chill night whistled around her. She flew high into the air, while below her the beast lay buried under an avalanche of earth, clumps of grass and yarrow laid on it like a patchwork quilt. As it shook itself free, Temperance spun, bringing her pistol to bear.

  “Estalia Vos!”

  The silver lance pierced the beast’s hide over its spine, right where four tendrils met. It let out a high-pitched shriek. Dropping to the ground, it thrashed amid the broken dirt. After a moment the movement lost its force, and the wolf lay still.

  Temperance landed on the top of the broken hill, clamping her hands to her thighs to absorb the impact. Her legs felt shaky, enough so that all she wanted was to lie down on the hill and not move for a while. Couldn’t do that yet though, not until she knew the daemon wolf was dead. It had taken two solid hits from silver, there wasn’t much that shook that off and walked away. She watched, waiting for its essence to trickle out.

  The plateau was quiet, other than the quiet tumble of a few distant rocks. Then, birdsong picked up, a lark or wren or some other such that starts with the sunrise. Like they had been holding their breath for the fighting to finish.

  “C’mon, hurry and get on with it already,” Temperance muttered under her breath.

  The beast gave a shudder, and she stepped closer, right to the edge of the cliff. Now that it was no longer moving, the wolf did not appear nearly so intimidating. There were patches along its side where its fur was missing, great bare spots where the skin puckered and scabbed over. Perhaps the creature had been sick, or old, or near the limit of what its body could endure, that might explain why attacks had come so infrequently. When this was all over she would speak with Martin and ask if he knew anything—

  Something pulled on her leg, and without warning Temperance found herself staring at the night sky, stars fading to ghosts as the light of dawn grew brighter. She glanced down before being dragged off the hill, and her heart lurched near all the way up her throat. While she had studied her quarry, one of the beast’s tendrils had snaked up the hill, and grasped ahold of her.

  Then she was sliding downward amid a hale of moss and small pebbles.

  She hit the ground. Before the shock wore off the tendril swung her into the air again. Moons and stars spun in a whirlwind of lights, then the ground came rushing towards her with the speed of a locomotive. She hit hard, teeth cracking against each other, ribs cracking against the rocks and dirt, one of her revolvers spinning away, lost in the dark. The air rushed from her lungs, leaving her gasping as her world tilted and she found herself airborne again.

  When she struck the second time, she heard something in her leg give. Temperance lay on the ground, panting, the shock of the last few moments holding her pain at bay. Then the tendril tightened its grip, and her leg twisted in two different angles.

  The pain was instant and all-consuming. She screamed for all she was worth, flailing her good leg at the tendril with a fury that was more trembling fit than attack. Something connected with her boot, and the tension in her leg eased, if only by the barest fraction. She opened her eyes. The beast’s face was only a foot from her own, one eye swollen shut, blood coursing down its muzzle.

  Not entirely aware of what she was doing, Temperance twisted and aimed her remaining revolver. She had a brief moment to note the sudden look of surprise in the wolf’s eyes. So you’re clever enough to recognize a threat, are you?

  She pulled the trigger, not able to remember but hoping against hope that this gun still had bullets. She forced sound out between a mouth of blood and broken teeth.

  “Hueno!”

  The lightning flash was so close, so intense, for a moment Temperance wondered if she might have lost her eyes for good. Shapes started to form, blurry and indistinct, and as the white faded away her triumph faded with it.

  The beast was staring back at her, its expression of surprise replaced with one of anger as hot as her weapon’s blast. She had missed. A foot away, and she had missed. Hell and hellfire, both.

  The tendril tightened again and wrenched her skyward. Everything spun, spun, spun, and she found herself floating, serene and secure across a golden sky. For a moment her pain was forgotten as she sailed carefree through the endless expanse. Then the laws of nature reasserted themselves and the earth reached up to claim her.

  Whether or not by intention, the creature had slipped its hold and sent her sailing over the plateau. Temperance lifted herself onto elbows in time to see it loping towards her, moving fast enough she thought it meant to run her to ground and finish this whole affair.

  She still had the revolver in her hand. She raised the gun, her vision swimming and creating triplets of the charging wolf as she did so. Pointing towards the center, she screamed, “Avesa!”

  Nothing happened. She cursed, spun the cylinder, aimed again. The beast was almost on her. It launched into the final leap—

  “Avesa!”

  A wall of dirt and moss erupted before her. The ground shook as the wolf impacted, and Temperance rolled with the force, then rolled again as a snarling mouth of fangs and hot breath burst through the hill. It snapped a
nd hissed, inches from her, and she slid away, pain coursing along so much of her body it felt like every bone was broken and bruised. She raised the revolver. One of the beast’s tendrils swung around the hill and knocked the weapon from her hands. It spun away, coming to rest teetering on the edge of the cliff.

  She tried to crawl towards it, then let out a scream. Something near her elbow pressed hard and sharp against her leathers, part of her and yet not a part any longer. probably a splintered bone but no way to tell without taking off the jacket. Somehow the arm still moved, so it wasn’t completely useless.

  Gritting her teeth, she forced her arm to push her forward. Push, drag. Push, drag. Push.

  The pain came in stratified waves of agony, each one leaving black spots over her vision that refused to fade. The gun seemed impossibly far away. Behind her, the beast thrashed violently, its head entrapped between the mound of dirt. That wouldn’t last long.

  She caught the revolver just before it slid over the side, cradling it close with her good arm. Setting it down beside her, Temperance considered her next move. A strange sense of calm settled on her, the sounds of the struggling daemon wolf fading away to nothing. Even the pain seemed an easy thing to ignore.

  The sun pulled itself above the horizon at last. Red streaks colored the mountain in a panoply of color, reflecting the dawn back to the valley below, washing it clean in waves of gentle pink. Staring at the sight, it was easy to see why the old traditions spoke of the Three dwelling on a mountaintop. At the moment Temperance couldn’t think of anywhere else she would want to be.

  Her options weren’t good. She only had six bullets left—one silver spike, three elemental strikers, and two bullets whose close-range usefulness could best be described as “a bad idea”. Given the beast had two rods in it already, it didn’t seem like another would accomplish much. Still, might as well try it.

  Wait. She had one other bullet, in her back pocket where she had kept the dirt movers. Sventa’s good luck charm. It was only good for pushing an enemy away, or knocking them off their feet if you were lucky. Useless, like the old man had said.

  Unless one could change the runes. It was a fool’s gambit, since most hexbullets were complex in their layout and design. It was why they took so long to create. But there was a simple way to reverse a rune’s effect—a single slash through its center. Usually a terrible idea, but in this instance it might just work.

  Using her knife was out of the question, so Temperance pinched the hexbullet between two fingers and sawed with the nail of her thumb. The metal was soft, but not that soft. She gritted her teeth and pressed harder, so hard she thought her finger might snap. The mound gave a final shudder, and a chunk slid away. It was now or never.

  Opening the revolver, she expelled the empty casings over the cliff. The first time she tried to get the bullet in it slipped between bloody fingers and almost rolled over the edge. Nearby the wolf let out a howl. She sensed it turning in her direction. The bullet went in this time, no complaints.

  The creature was charging at her, faster than the eye could follow. She twisted, spine screaming, leg screaming, arm screaming. Mouth screaming, for all that.

  Panic coursed through her. What’s the right word of power? The form has to change with the intent, switch the polarity, and . . . got it!

  “Hielota!” she screamed.

  The bullet sped away. Perhaps it was an effect of the spell, or a trick of the morning sun, but in its wake the hexbullet left trailing motes of pink light. Like petals of some ethereal rose made manifest. They swirled around in a wind only they could feel, swooping, gliding, the sight of them filling her with exuberance.

  The daemon beast leapt into the air. A tendril tried to swat her projectile, but instead the bullet exploded into a plume of pink petals. They drifted away in the wind.

  Temperance let her limbs go limp, let the ground claim her at last. It wasn’t difficult to do, only sheer grit had been holding her up. She turned and watched the beast sail through the air.

  It kept sailing. Too late it realized something was wrong and tried to save itself. Paws and tendrils scrabbled for the earth as it passed Temperance’s head and carried on over the cliff. It held for a second in the open air, suspended over nothing, tendrils straining to reach the rocks that were now hopelessly distant. Its eyes met Temperance’s own. She saw the despair reflected in them.

  Then it fell, and was gone.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Temperance lay panting where she had fallen, and a chill settled into her bones. Now that the thrill and terror of the fight had worn thin she felt everything wrong with her ten times over. A sheen of perspiration covered her, and there was a dark patch on the elbow of her jacket. Even as she watched, a trickle of blood squeezed through the seam, adding to a growing patch that the cold earth below drank with fervor. She didn’t dare lift herself to see, but likely her leg was in similar straights.

  The fight had cost her more than she would have thought possible. She wasn’t getting down off these cliffs, not today, maybe not for weeks while her bones knit. Which meant she wasn’t getting down at all. She’d starve, or freeze to death, if she didn’t bleed out in the next few minutes.

  Well, if she was going to be on the wrong side of the earth, better make sure she did the job proper. Moving wasn’t easy, but she didn’t have far to go either. Just a matter of gritting her teeth enough so she didn’t scream with every twist and turn of her muscles. She wriggled along until her nose cleared the cliff’s edge.

  The beast lay at the bottom, cracked in two like a broken egg. It didn’t even so much as twitch. If it had any daemon essence inside she had missed its escape while out cold, but some instinct told her it wouldn’t be back.

  That thing was powerful, but it was no daemon. The sudden realization surprised her. Which means now that the servant has fallen, the master should make his grand appearance.

  As if sensing her thoughts, something moved nearby. A shape emerged from one of the caves, perhaps the same one the wolf had come from earlier. It moved towards her, all blurred colors and rotating shapes. Temperance realized she had fallen back against the earth again, the colors nothing more than patches swarming over her vision. That wasn’t good.

  There was still the last remaining silver spike. It slid from her pocket, fingers uncompromising and sluggish, rolling along the ground. She fumbled about, found it, dropped it again, blacked out a moment from the concentrating, and managed to capture it at last. Opening her revolver almost did her in, but she managed it. Gun loaded, she drew sight on the figure.

  They were already much closer than Temperance would have thought possible. The person hovered a few feet away, but she couldn’t make out their features. She raised the revolver, but couldn’t seem to keep her arms from shaking. Colors flashed across her vision, and every time she blinked the stranger was somewhere else.

  Elsewhere, but always closer.

  “Stay back! I swear I’ll shoot!” The words were more of a muttered growl than a shout. Even she could tell they had no teeth. The figure crouched next to her as blackness reached out and pulled Temperance under at last.

  * * *

  The first thing she saw was the firelight. It burned at the mouth of the cave, a rather pitiful thing that sputtered and threatened to go out with each change in the wind. She had managed better fires while drunk in the middle of the arid wilds with little more than rocks and roots for fuel.

  Temperance couldn’t have been more glad if it was a hearth fire at the nicest saloon in Korvana.

  Outside, the sky had filled with billowing clouds, dark against the distant sun. A few snowflakes drifted to the ground, dusting the bare earth outside and doing little to disguise the cratered and hillocked wasteland left by her battle with the wolf beast. Inside the cave though was warm and dry from the fire.

  Only then did she realize that all of her aches had vanished.

  Temperance sat up, a rough sack serving as a blanket falling away from
her. A part of her noticed the Federation seal stamped across it in red, but she didn’t pay it much mind. Underneath, her bare arms showed in the firelight, clean of blood and without a scratch on them. She pushed the sack off further, and found her legs both whole, not a broken bone she could find. No fragments jackknifing from her elbow. No crushed ribs. She ran her tongue in a circle. All her teeth were back where they belonged.

  It shouldn’t have been possible, but there it was. She was as good as she had been before the fight. Better, in fact—the wound to her shoulder she had taken during the fight with the jack-cat was gone as well.

  She was so intent at looking over her healed limbs she almost didn’t catch the figure climbing to their feet near the cave entrance. Only once they stepped around the fire did she shake herself from her stupor.

  A young man stood there, looking at her with a curious expression, face gaunt from malnutrition or some other malady. His clothes were in worse shape than her own, crumbling bits of linsey-rak the same dull gray and brown worn by everyone else in Shady Hollow. The pants held themselves together with patches made from his shirt, and that was little more than strips hanging loose over his frame. If he had shoes, he wasn’t wearing them.

  Fear tinged the man’s eyes. Only a touch, but it was there.

  Then she noticed the spikes running along the arms, curling as they approached the tip. Her hand reached to her side. Both her holsters and bandoliers were missing.

  “If you are looking for your weapons, they are over there.” The daemon motioned towards a pile of her gear resting atop a crate, also stamped with the Federation seal.

  Temperance’s gaze flicked between the creature and her equipment. She lunged forward, only to flop back down with a wince. Her head felt like she was three bottles into a nightlong bender.

  “Ah, that would be the vertigo. We would caution against attempting that again, at least for the next few hours. You suffered massive internal hemorrhaging and a severe concussion, not to mention fractures to your humerus and tibia. It may be a few days before you regain complete functionality.”