“Well,” Jonathan said. “He sounds… wonderful.” What an oddly specific set of skills. He took a deep breath. “I guess it’s my turn then. I’m a two-century old vampire noble, so I have the usual physical enhancements. I’m not much good at fighting, but I do have basic training. When it comes to magic, I’m a scholar, so I know a lot about different forms of generic magic, runes, seals, and Signs. However, I’m not very powerful. My Words are probably best suited for gathering information, and I can use Words like [Scry], [Discern Magic], [Reveal], and so on quite easily.”
“Information gathering?” Aria bit her lip. “That’s more valuable than you think. Knowing what you’re up against is half the battle. What’s your range on [Scry]?”
Jonathan shrugged. “Anything within several miles is easy. With a proper focus and a target, I’m not sure. I’d probably run out of power before I hit the limits of my range.”
Aria stared. “Are you serious? What level of detail does your [Scry] have?”
“It’s nothing special,” Jonathan replied. “There are people who can use [Scry] across entire continents several times a day. As for detail… it’s like I’m there.”
Aria and the others exchanged looks before the paladin reached out and put one hand on Jonathan’s shoulder. “We are definitely bringing you along on missions if we can. I’m not sure you realise how valuable that combination of range and detail is.”
“Uh… great.”
“Yes,” Aria said with a grin. “It is great.” She looked at Miles. “What about him? What does he specialise in?”
“He’s my butler –”
“Assassination and close combat,” Miles said quietly but firmly. “Both armed and unarmed although I am better unarmed. I specialise in physical enhancement magic.”
Jonathan’s head whipped around so fast it was a miracle he didn’t snap his neck. “What?”
Miles gave him a wan smile. “Sir, I have served you faithfully for many years, and I am honoured to have done so – but I was not always in your service.”
“Ah, right.” Miles had been badly injured when he’d first arrived at Jonathan’s castle. He’d have to ask him about it later. “So… what now?”
“Now that you’re officially our sponsor and a member of this team, we wait.” Aria’s eyes gleamed. “And in a city like Bloodmark, we won’t have to wait long.”
She was right.
Interlude One – Heretic
This was not the first time Aria had been accused of heresy. It wasn’t even the second time. It was actually the fourth time, which was really quite remarkable since statisticians generally agreed that only one in every three paladins accused of heresy by their peers managed to escape execution. Indeed, she’d never heard of anyone surviving four accusations. Marcus – that stubborn, wonderful, obnoxious, old man – had successfully survived three accusations and had been well on his way to surviving a fourth when he’d been repeatedly impaled by some of the more… fanatical members of their order, or so the senior paladins said. Personally, she had her doubts. Despite his age, Marcus had still been a formidable warrior with enough cunning to put a whole den of foxes to shame. Knowing him, he’d faked his death somehow and was happily enjoying a drink on a beach somewhere with a scantily clad woman on each arm. She smiled. Maybe she’d run into him again one of these days – if she survived.
Much like Marcus, who’d been her mentor, she’d always had enemies in her order. No matter how loyal she was, there were always people who thought she should be doing more. If she killed one vampire, they wanted to know why she hadn’t killed ten. If she exorcised one demon, they wanted to know why she hadn’t exorcised a hundred, which was silly because if there were a hundred demons for her to exorcise, they had bigger things to worry about than her loyalty. And if she helped one person who was in trouble with the forces of darkness, they would ask why she hadn’t simply killed everyone and burned the whole damn area to the ground. After all, how else could they ensure that any evil had been dealt with? Some of her colleagues were far too fond of stabbing things, and cleansing fire was such a handy tool for getting rid of people they disagreed with.
It made her wonder why she’d joined in the first place. Oh, wait. That was Marcus’s fault too. Apparently, he’d dragged her into the order after nefarious demons had destroyed her village and killed everyone in it. She’d only been a baby at the time, so she only had Marcus’s word to go by. Given his talent for stumbling into awkward situations, it was equally likely that he’d simply found her on the side of the road one day and decided to keep her because he wanted to get out of taking more missions.
What made this accusation of heresy different from the others was that this was the first time they’d bothered to send people after her. Well, technically, they’d sent people after her before, but they’d been novices or people carrying angry missives. Naturally, she’d handled them with a minimum of violence before finding enough evidence to exonerate herself. More often than not, a stout whack with her buckler was enough to convince them to back off while she sought to prove that she hadn’t fallen prey to the unholy wiles of the Dark Powers. It had been a bit tiresome at times. The novices hadn’t been much of a threat, but there had been a lot of them. It made her wonder how many of her fellows had turned to heresy out of sheer exasperation – probably more than her order would admit.
This time was different. She was good – very, very good – but she wasn’t arrogant enough to think she could win against more than a dozen of her fellow elite paladins. No matter how bad it looked, it was time for her to beat a very hasty and very tactical retreat. Where exactly she would go was less important than getting as far away from her bloodthirsty colleagues as she could. She still had plenty of life goals, and none of them involved being turned into a pincushion.
“Burn the heretic!” one of her fellows screamed. She rolled her eyes. Despite the situation, Justin’s lack of creativity never ceased to disappoint her. “Burn her with fire!” Setting aside how boring his idea was, it wasn’t like any of them had a pyre and a torch handy.
“No! Burn her with light! Unleash the cleansing light of the dawn to smite her!” another roared. “Let the gods themselves be her judge!”
Aria was strongly tempted to roll her eyes again, but the words were accompanied by a crossbow bolt, which she just barely managed to evade. It did help that most of her fellow paladins preferred melee weapons. In a move that did not improve her opinion of her pursuers, the next projectile was a butter knife. Clearly, some of her colleagues had rushed to pursue her, grabbing whatever was at hand before trying to purge her heresy. On the upside, a butter knife was much more fun to deal with than a crossbow bolt or a broadsword. Out of the corner of her eye, she spotted a blindingly bright bolt of pure radiance. Instinct told her to ignore it. It struck her – and all she got was a warm and fuzzy feeling. In fact, the ache in her side from an earlier blow had begun to fade.
“What? Impossible! How could she have shrugged off my attack?” The paladin who’d thrown the bolt of magic sounded utterly aghast as though someone had taken his favourite puppy, strapped dwarven explosives to it, and punted it over a mountain. “Clearly, the Dark Powers have granted her superhuman strength!”
Aria looked heavenward. Alas, the heavens did not answer her unspoken plea by sending a bolt of lightning down to strike her idiotic pursuers. The thing about divine magic – like the spell she’d just been hit by – was that it drew power from the god they served. That was how paladins could achieve things far beyond what they – or any human – should have been able to do. By becoming conduits of divine power, they could do the impossible – but only if their god agreed to help them. If, however, their god did not agree, then divine magic would either not work or do something unexpected. Sadly, her erstwhile colleagues did not see the failure of their divine magic against her as a sign that maybe they were wrong about her being a heretic. On the contrary, it was clearly proof that she had consorted with entities of
such incredible evil and maliciousness that divine magic could no longer harm her. Why, if they didn’t kill her now, who knew what fiendish, unspeakable horrors she’d unleash by next Tuesday? Surely, if they didn’t stop her today, then by next Tuesday, she would be bathing in the blood of innocent children, puppies, and kittens while strangling baby unicorns or something else similarly wicked.
Good grief.
“Faster, brothers and sisters! We must strike her down before the powers of darkness within her grow too great for us to contest!” There was a theatrical pause, and Aria sighed. Justin had always been too theatrical for his own good. That – and his obsession with fire – had been responsible for the scar on his face. A demon had interrupted him mid speech after the fire he’d set had failed to kill it. In fairness, the demon had given him a good ten minutes to speak before clawing him. There was, after all, a proper way of handling an epic confrontation between good and evil. But even a demon could only stand so much, and Justin had been going on and on and on. “Oh, and get her little bear too. It’s evil as well.”
Little bear?
Aria tightened her hold on the very big bear she was riding on. The bear – who was actually named Eileen – was the whole reason for this mess, and what a wonderful, horrible mess it was.
“Can’t you change into anything faster?” Aria asked. She wasn’t normally one to complain, and Eileen was somehow outpacing their pursuers despite bears not normally being able to outrun horses, but surely the shape shifter could transform into something faster. Aria wasn’t sure what Eileen should transform into exactly, but there had to be something better than a bear.
A small, shadowy figure appeared next Aria and held up a wooden sign with writing on it. Not yet. Give me a few minutes. That last attack they hit me with is making things hard.
“I’m not sure we have a few minutes.” Aria turned and saw one of their pursuers closing in. He must have used a Word on his horse because there was no way a horse was supposed to go that fast. She reached for the sign. “Can I have that?”
The strange creature shrugged and handed her the sign. Now, a wooden sign wouldn’t normally have been much good against a paladin. Paladins were typically well armoured, and almost all of them had access to protective Words and other defensive magic. However, she wasn’t trying to kill him. Instead, she tossed the sign backward – it was deceptively heavy – and caught him right in the chest. It didn’t do any real damage, but the impact was enough to knock him off his horse with a startled squawk. It was a testament to how little his horse liked him that the animal continued for another fifty or so yards before turning and simply staring at him.
Nice! Another sign appeared, and Aria had a feeling the words belonged to the shadowy creature and not Eileen. Should I make another sign?
“Yes.” Aria still wasn’t sure how Eileen’s summons made the wooden signs, but she didn’t care. In a situation like this, access to a steady supply of large wooden projectiles was extremely useful. She grabbed another sign, turned, took aim, and then threw it. The sign caught another paladin across the shoulder. His whole body jerked to the side, and he toppled off his horse. Not bad. Maybe she should have started throwing signs earlier. “Keep making signs!”
Aria was about to throw another sign when a fireball forced her to duck. The others must have wised up. If their patron god refused to help them smite her – and wasn’t that telling – then they’d have to do it the old-fashioned way: with fire, lightning, and whatever generic elemental magic they could muster, along with a healthy dose of projectile weaponry. A bolt of lightning crackled past, so close her hair stood on end, and Aria hastily reinforced her defences. She could not afford to get hit by a spell like that.
[Enduring Protection].
She’d never been able to create the most powerful barriers with her Words, but she could layer them on top of each other, and they could last for a long, long time. [Enduring Protection] alone wouldn’t stand up to some of the spells headed their way, but several instances of it would. The multi-layered barrier settled around them as a white glow, and although the next fireball struck and detonated with a thunderous boom, it failed to do any real damage. A truly big spell might be able to pierce her defences, but she was banking on her former comrades’ lack of expertise in generic elemental magic. They were also approaching a steep, winding section of road that ought to make aiming difficult.
Hold on! Eileen’s summon held up another sign as the shape-shifter struggled to keep her bulky body on the road. An ominously sharp corner loomed ahead of them. This isn’t going to be easy.
“I am holding on!” Aria grabbed the sign and flung it backward. This time, her opponents were ready. One of them blasted it out of the air with a bolt of flame, and Aria cursed as her defences absorbed a jagged bolt of lightning. If her memory was right, none of them had Words related to elemental magic, so they were doing this with generic magic. Words might be more specific, but they were also far more efficient. If they were relying solely on generic magic to attack, she doubted they’d be able to keep this up for much longer. Then again, based on Eileen’s ragged breathing, she wasn’t sure how much longer she and Eileen would be able to run.
And to think she’d only been trying to help someone. Marcus, crazy as he had been, was right – as usual. She really was a softie.
Aria had stumbled across Eileen not long ago after completing a mission. That mission had not been easy. Werewolves were generally impervious to disease. However, under rare circumstances, most of them magical, they could be infected. Dealing with half a pack of rabid werewolves was not her idea of a good time, especially when the strain of magical rabies they’d been infected with gave them additional powers, like the ability to vomit corrosive acid. Thankfully, they’d been driven too far into madness to think clearly. She’d set traps for them, and after a great deal of running, screaming, and bashing people over the head, she’d managed to subdue them long enough for their fellow pack members to restrain them.
That had been her first mistake.
Apparently, she was supposed to have killed the lot of them. Even if she’d wanted to, how did they expect her to kill an entire pack of werewolves? She wasn’t a dragon. It had taken everything she had just to trap them. She also wasn’t supposed to work with the other werewolves, never mind the fact that the only people who could be counted on to restrain the rabid werewolves were the other members of their pack. Oh, wait. She knew the answer. Some of her colleagues would have tried to kill not only the infected werewolves but also the uninfected werewolves too. Good grief. Setting aside the fact that trying to wipe out the whole pack would only end in her death, she didn’t see the point in going out of her way to kill people who hadn’t done anything wrong. She would kill people if she had to, but needless death had never been something she endorsed.
On her way back, she’d run across an old vampire who worked as a teacher at a night school. He’d spent the past fifteen years teaching people how to be a secretary, scribe, or clerk. To say that he was harmless would have been a tremendous understatement. She’d met goldfish that were more threatening. Oh, she was only too happy to kill evil vampires, but he was the opposite of evil. All the blood he drank was donated, and the townsfolk and his students loved him. He even helped people file their tax returns. She’d left him with a pat on the back and some advice on how to avoid other paladins.
That had been her second mistake.
For many in her order, his mere existence was an evil of the highest order. He was a vampire. He had to die. She should have put a stake through his heart, dragged him into the sun, and then stepped back to let nature do the rest – which would have been hard since staking him would have turned him into a pile of ash. As much as she disliked paperwork, she was not about to kill a vampire for making an honest, decent living, even if that living involved teaching other people how to generate more paperwork. Heck, her order should be encouraging other vampires to follow his example, so they could focus their e
fforts on genuine threats like the demon lords that had recently resurfaced. Those fellows had sworn to conquer the world and enslave humanity, which made them a good deal more dangerous than one old, paper-pushing vampire.
And then there was the bear – or rather, Eileen, who was stuck as a bear.
She’d found Eileen a few days after running into the vampire after villagers told her about a bear that could communicate using wooden signs. It had sounded bizarre – she’d been certain she’d misheard – but she’d decided to investigate just in case. It was, after all, better to be safe than sorry. After meeting Eileen, she’d realised the villagers were wrong. Eileen was not a bear. She was a half-human shape-shifter who had, for some reason, gotten stuck in a non-humanoid form. Eileen had chosen a bear form after her attempts to enter nearby towns and villages in a variety of different forms had been met with screams, pitchforks, and angry mobs. If she couldn’t live around people, then her best bet was live in the woods, and a bear was perfectly suited for life in the woods. The wooden signs were not the result of demonic collusion or an unholy pact made with the Dark Powers. They were simply something her summons could create to help Eileen communicate.
That had been strike three.
Aria was clearly a heretic because Eileen could not possibly be someone stuck in a bad situation. No. Eileen was a scion of darkness, a bear that had been corrupted by the Dark Powers and gifted with the power of transformation, so she could better slaughter and corrupt the innocent. They weren’t totally wrong. Eileen had eventually revealed that her situation had been caused by an unfortunate encounter with the Dark Powers who had somehow made it impossible for her to take on a humanoid form. Aria wasn’t sure if she should laugh or cry at how absurd the whole situation was. Her overly zealous colleagues had been so, so close to stumbling onto the right answer. She was, however, sure about one thing. There was no way that she was going to hand Eileen over for execution.
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