The Last Cleric

by Layton Green

  “Tuskers aren’t known for their thoroughness,” the Brewer added. He glanced back at the ruins of the camp. “Not usually,” he muttered.

  “We could skirt the edge of the forest,” Marguerite said. “Check the closest villages for stragglers.”

  The Brewer had taken a long rapier with a leather-wrapped hilt from one of the bodies. He tested the blade and said, “I wouldn’t mind meeting a few tuskers along the way, too.”

  Both looked to Caleb to decide. His instinct was to run as fast as possible in the opposite direction, to never stumble upon a group of tuskers or witness such a horrific sight again. But the unblinking eyes of the slain children wouldn’t let him look away.

  Face grim, he ran a hand through his hair and pushed off the stump. “Let’s keep going.”

  -26-

  Hours later, when Val and the others stopped for water atop a small knoll, they spotted their first band of roving demons. Synne saw them first, whispering for everyone to flatten down behind a boulder. Val followed her finger to a brown-stubbled valley off to their left, where a dozen toad-like creatures the size of bulls bounded over the moor. They fought as they moved, jockeying for position, grunting words in a garbled language.

  “Disgusting creatures,” Adaira whispered.

  “And dangerous,” Rucker added. “Those are vrog demons. Their skin is poison and they’ll swallow ye whole.”

  The party hunkered down until the toad demons passed out of sight. Pushing to his feet, Val trudged onward, unsure how long ago they had left the town. The passage of time felt irrelevant in the blue mist. He had never thought about it, but he realized the separation between day and night added flow and purpose, heft, to the daily routine.

  Bands of roving demons became common sightings. The type of demon varied: bipedal monstrosities with multiple sets of arms; demons that resembled terrifying versions of familiar animals; demons that bore no relation to any living creature Val had ever seen, things born of flame and nightmare.

  Fearful of the moor’s open vistas, the party kept as low a profile as they could, hiding in the spongy, knee-high shrubbery whenever a band of demons came within sight. The ground dried out as the party topped a particularly long slope, the heather a blanket of rust on the hillside. When they reached the top, they gazed down upon a comely vista in the distance: A city of golden stone and stately towers cradled by the undulations of the moors.

  Rucker leaned his good arm on a knee. “So it’s true. Wherever we are, Badŏn exists here.”

  “It’s quite beautiful,” Adaira said softly. “Just like in the history books.”

  “Was beautiful,” Rucker corrected. “Now it’s a demon pen.”

  True enough. As Val looked down at Badŏn, he saw a swarm of dark forms massed outside the gates. He shivered. How were they supposed to make it into the city alive, not to mention finding and capturing its ruler?

  A shriek came from overhead. Val looked up and saw a demon-man with leathery skin and dragon wings hovering in the sky. The creature shrieked again and pointed down at the party. In the distance, a pack of demons near the city turned towards the hill.

  “Shut it up,” Rucker said hoarsely.

  The demon danced back and forth in the sky, continuing to betray their position. It was too far away for his fledgling Spirit Fire, so Val opted for a different spell he had been practicing. An amalgamation of the Moon Ray spell in his father’s notebook, adapted to the only light source on offer: the blue mist.

  Except he had yet to test it in battle.

  Synne herded the group back down the hill, below the sightline of the city. The demon parties in the distance could no longer see them, but the man-demon tracked their position from the air, shrieking and pointing.

  Val gathered his magic and held out the tip of his staff as a focal point. He pretended he was shooting an arrow of magic, then suffused it with the essence of the blue mist. Drawing forth and channeling the light from the sky was much harder than a simple illumination spell, but after a tense wait, a beam of blue light shot out from his staff and struck the flying man-demon in the chest.

  The beast gave an inhuman cry and darted backwards, trying to escape the ray, but Val followed it, channeling the beam until the demon burst into blue flame and dropped from the sky.

  Not as powerful as Spirit Fire, Val thought, but not too shabby.

  Adaira gripped his arm as the party sprinted back down the slope. If they could reach the ridge they had just traveled over, a series of smaller dales and hillocks awaited, presenting better options for concealment.

  The clacking of a pack of demons arose behind them. How far would they pursue them, Val wondered? How fast were they?

  He picked up Rucker, and they all flew low to the ground in order to stay out of sight. With a burst of speed, the party topped the ridge and then landed, surveying the stippled landscape. To their left, a stream cut an S-curve through the hills. On their right was an uneven valley pockmarked with knobby mounds of granite.

  Yet topping the next ridge over, running and flying and hopping straight towards them, was a horde of demons of all shapes and sizes, at least a hundred strong.

  “Queen’s Blood,” Rucker whispered.

  The party whipped around and saw another group of demons, even larger than the first, racing towards the slope they had just climbed. Val looked skyward, thinking they might escape through the air, but instead he saw a dozen man-demons approaching, the rasp of dragon wings flapping out an obscene leathery rhythm.

  The horde of demons bore down on Val and the others from all sides. He tried to force away the terror that had buckled his knees and scooped a hole in his gut. “Should we try to surrender?”

  “Demons take no prisoners, boy,” Rucker said, hefting the battle-axe he had taken from Myrddin’s tomb. “We stand our ground and kill as many as we can.”

  Adaira fingered her necklace and stood next to Val. Synne flexed her fingers, hands loose at her sides, eyes flashing and ready for battle. As Val summoned his magic, prepared for a futile display of power, thoughts of his brothers flooded his mind, of the good times they had enjoyed together, of the years that could have been. Surprising to him, the same acute sense of loss surged through him for Adaira.

  “You should escape if you can,” Val said to Dida, as the howling demons thundered down the hillsides. “Through one of your dimension doors.”

  The Zimbabwean mage had closed his eyes and was whispering to himself. At Val’s words, Dida opened his eyes and calmly folded his hands in front of him. “Such spells are for elder spirit mages, I fear, not bibliomancers. I could hide in a Rune Box until the air ran out, assuming the demons couldn’t see me. But I prefer to stand with my brethren.”

  Rucker roared and brandished his axe. He cut an impressive figure, though Val knew he was a sapling in the face of the hurricane that approached. Fear turned to rage, and Val trembled with helpless fury. In desperation, he twisted the ring he had found in Myrddin’s tomb. When nothing happened, he waved it at the sky. Still no response. Out of options, he picked out a demon on which to unleash the last of his Spirit Fire.

  “Hey—over here!”

  At first Val thought he was imagining the raspy male voice, because there was no one else in sight, but the words came again, more urgent this time. He whipped his head to the left, towards one of the knobby mounds that dotted the slope of the ridgeline like thimbles.

  Was that a hand waving them in? Or a hallucination born of despair? He peered closer, to where the side of a waist-high mound rubbed against the slope of the hill, not ten yards from where they stood. A man’s face, hard-eyed and unshaven, popped out of the mossy undergrowth wedged between the hill and the mound. By now the rest of the party had noticed.

  “Quickly, now,” the man said, “unless you aim to be demon food. I’m closing up on the count of three.”

  Val exchanged a quick, desperate glance with the rest of the party, then turned and bolted for the mound.

  “S
hield yer entrance if you can,” the man said. “I’ve been following you all day, and I know yer wizards.”

  Dida waved his hands, blurring their forms to match the color of the vegetation. It was a crude disguise, useless from up close, but it might create confusion from a distance.

  The man’s face disappeared. Val panicked for a moment, thinking it was a trick, but as they drew to within a few feet of where he had emerged, Val saw a thin vertical crevasse where the mound met the ridgeline, a fold in the quilted landscape invisible from a dozen feet away.

  A dirt-encrusted hand extended. Val took it and squeezed through, into a musty chamber the size of a walk-in closet. A rectangular tunnel, framed by rough-cut standing stones, led into the darkness of the hillside. Val rushed into the tunnel, allowing the others to enter. The man concealed the narrow opening with a moss-covered strip of wood.

  “Hurry,” the man said, picking up a torch and striding down the tunnel. “They might pick up our scent.”

  “And if they do?” Rucker asked.

  “The barrows are a maze of tunnels. Maybe we lose them, maybe not. We can talk later.”

  He didn’t wait for an answer, and the party didn’t have a choice. Val followed the others as they followed their savior deep into the earthen tunnel system. It was not until they had run a few hundred yards that Val noticed what the man had wrapped around the waist of his tattered patchwork clothing.

  A black sash.

  Val caught his breath. The first group of black-sashed gypsies he had encountered had stabbed his friend Mari to death, and the second had tried to kill Val and his fellow students in an alley.

  Maybe the man had taken the sash off of someone else. Maybe things were different in this world.

  Or maybe they were going to have a serious disagreement.

  None of it mattered at the moment. The man was their lifeline, and they followed him blindly through a series of intersected tunnels barely wide enough to squeeze through. At times, the ceiling dipped and Val and Dida had to duck their heads.

  No sounds of pursuit echoed from behind. They ran for at least a mile before slowing to a walk, yet still the man continued, leading them deeper and deeper into the warren of passages formed by beaten earth and standing stones. The tunnels smelled of soil and musty stone, and they took so many turns Val quickly lost track of the route. The size of the stones, as well as the crude construction, recalled the architecture of the cemetery on the moor. Dolmens and menhirs and megaliths, harbingers of an ancient culture attuned to the natural world.

  “Who are ye?” Rucker asked at last.

  “A traveler, like yerselves.”

  “What mean ye? From Londyn?”

  “Ye know what I mean. From the other Urfe.”

  Rucker used the butt of the battle-axe to spin the man around in the middle of the corridor. “Speak plainly.”

  The man stopped to catch his breath, his eyes flicking into the darkness of the tunnel. “We’re deep enough inside that ye’ll never find yer way out. Even if ye did, there’s nothing but death out there. So take yer hands off me and let’s have a civilized discussion.”

  With a glare, Rucker lowered his axe.

  “I assume ye came for Tobar?” the man asked. “Sent by the Congregation?”

  No one denied it.

  He lifted the end of his sash. “Then ye know what I represent. Doesn’t matter over here, though. Demons don’t care about black sashes and wizard stoles, gypsy or free, who’s taken a blasted Oath or not. They eat and they kill and that’s the whole of it.”

  “Where’s Tobar?” Adaira asked.

  He shrugged. “Dead with the rest of ’em, I presume. There were five of us came through. Demons swarmed us soon after we came over. I fled like everyone else, got lucky and stumbled on an entrance in the barrows.” His mouth tightened. “No one else made it.”

  “How long?” Rucker said roughly.

  The man shrugged. “A year? Maybe more.”

  The time period matched what they knew. Val gave a small shudder. A year in this hellhole. “How do you survive?”

  “I hunt and forage close to the entrances. The demons either don’t know or don’t care about the tunnels.”

  “And your plan is what,” Adaira said, “live like an animal until you die?”

  “What would you have me do, lady? Run a hundred miles across the moor and pray no one sees me? I’m no wizard. It’s death out there for me.” He smirked. “Which is why I saved ye.”

  “What do you mean?” Val said. “What can we do?”

  “Probably nothing. But if there’s a chance to escape this accursed world, it must lie with the crown Tobar stole.”

  Adaira nodded. “We suspect as much, too.”

  “What about the wizards who tried to follow him?” Val asked.

  “Is that what they told you?” He gave a rough chuckle. “Tobar didn’t flee. He stood his ground. When they tried to blast him out of existence, the crown glowed like the birth of a star, everything went black, and we found ourselves here. Tobar tried everything to get it to work again.”

  “So where is it?” Rucker asked. “The crown?”

  “The last thing I saw before I ran away was a demon with the face of a man, and as tall as two men, carrying Tobar away. Crown and all.”

  “Carrying off a full spirit mage?” Dida said, doubtfully.

  “Just telling ye what I saw. Why would I lie?”

  “How does that help?” Rucker asked. “Unless ye know where to find him?”

  “We arrived near the town of golden stone. The demon carrying Tobar was headed right towards it.”

  “Badŏn,” Adaira murmured.

  The black sash gypsy pressed his lips together and said, “I don’t want to believe it. But it looks just like the legends say.”

  Rucker leaned his arm on a knee. “Whether it’s truly Badŏn or not, what good does the knowledge do us, with a few thousand demons around the gates?”

  The man returned his gaze with one almost as hard, and even more desperate. “Because I know a way inside.”

  The black-sashed gypsy’s name was Ferin Siralaw. As tall as Val, broader at the shoulder, a year of living underground had carved out hollows in his cheeks and stripped his flesh of fat. While they walked, he twirled a pair of short scimitars with black handles like he knew how to use them.

  When they reached one of the wider intersections, Ferin bowed and swept a hand out, showcasing a bed of moss covered by a filthy blanket. There was also a pair of old buckets filled with water, a pile of berries and dried mushrooms, and a cracked mirror.

  “Welcome to my palace.” He picked up the mirror, grinning at his grimy reflection and stained, uneven teeth. “Got to make sure I’m still handsome, after all. I found the buckets near the city. It never rains here, but the streams are always full. The work of the demons, is me guess.”

  Dida’s face turned quizzical. “Why do you sleep in an intersection of tunnels?”

  “So he can see what’s coming,” Rucker said.

  Ferin passed the water around. “Don’t know who built the tunnels or why, but they’re sturdy and go for miles. I know of at least a dozen exits onto the moor. They’ve kept me alive so far.”

  “Do you have a plan?” Adaira asked. “Once we reach the city?”

  “Get the crown or die trying, lady. I don’t even know if it will take us back. That’s yer job. I just know I can’t live like this anymore.”

  She gave his sash a disdainful glance. “How do we know we can trust you? You’d slash our throats if you had the chance.”

  Ferin’s smile was cold. “Don’t believe everything ye hear. But I could say the same to ye, no?”

  “Not without due cause, or in cold blood.”

  Ferin gave a harsh laugh. “Due cause? Do ye know what’s happening in the Ninth, or even in yer own city?”

  “Do you?” Val said. “Hiring an assassin to target students?”

  “How else should we fight the Congregati
on? We live like dogs in the street.” Fists clenched, Ferin worked to bring his anger under control. “Ye don’t know the way to the city, but I don’t stand a chance without ye. We need each other. I propose a truce. Find the crown, return home, and go our separate ways.”

  “We’ll find it ourselves,” Val said.

  “It’ll take weeks, and ye better pray the demons don’t hear ye.”

  Adaira laid a hand on Val’s arm. “We accept your offer,” she said to Ferin. “Nothing more, nothing less.”

  Dida gave a sigh of relief, Rucker looked bored, and Val noticed that Synne had edged closer to Ferin.

  Val backed off, knowing Adaira had made the right choice. He understood Ferin’s anger, had seen the Fens and the poverty, but killing innocent people was never the answer. Moreover, while the Congregation had once seemed like a terrifying entity, Val realized his viewpoint had started to shift. The rule of wizards on Urfe was far from perfect, but at least its streets were mostly peaceful, and its cities clean. Earth, too, was a messy place, and sometimes hard choices had to be made. He had also just had a firsthand education as to what happens when ignorance and prejudice were allowed free reign: charlatan druid-priests holding a town hostage; Adaira almost strung up in a tree for healing a child. Not to mention Val’s own horrific encounters with the black sash gypsies, the murder of Legate Wainwright, and Urfe’s history of wizard persecution during the Age of Sorrows.

  He would choose an imperfect government over anarchy, any day of the week. Progress over superstition.

  They had not had a proper rest in ages, and decided to take the opportunity to recharge. Not trusting Ferin, the party posted a guard and got a fitful night’s sleep in his hideout.

  In Val’s dreams, everywhere he went, the village girl he had killed floated above him, her hair a halo spread around her, damning him with her eyes.

  After everyone woke, they had a cold meal and resumed trekking through the gloomy tunnels. Except for the rats and voles, they saw no signs of life, heard nothing from the world above.