Oathbreaker Interlude 8 - Carve (Patreon)

Many years later

Somewhere in the subcontinent

Several months after the defeat of the pretender Evangeline Ark

The knife made one final cut, and then it was done. The carver leaned in, pursed his lips, and blew off the dust. When he held the mask up to the light, the flames seemed to dance in the hollow crescents he’d carved for eyes.

“Still needs polishing,” he muttered. “I haven’t worked with this kind of wood before.”

“You are an artist,” the man in black said.

Carus blushed. He wasn’t used to receiving praise for his work, and coming from a man who was a famed artist, it filled him with a sense of recognition. He turned the mask over in his hand and pointed to a socket where it would fit to the frame he’d already prepared.

“I used the script you showed me.” His voice was raspy and quiet, at odds with his animated gestures. Just as his gray-brown hair and gaunt face were at odds with his nineteen years of age. “They didn’t come easy. It was like the wood resisted the chisel, and when I did start it felt like…”

He paused here, unsure how to explain. When he’d made those cuts on the inside face of the mask, the wood had fought him. It felt like he was torturing it, and a pus-like sap had leaked out, which should have been impossible…

A long finger reached into the firelight and touched the edge of the mask lightly, tracing the narrow line where the strange script had been carved into the inner edge. The man in black hummed softly.

“And you felt nothing?” He asked. His voice, in contrast to Carus’s husky drawl, was melodic and refined. He surely had to be a great man, someone highborn.

Carus hesitated before admitting, “I felt a bit ill while I was carving them.”

He’d vomited several times, and every movement of the blade had taken all his will and focus to remain precise through the nausea. He’d never felt anything like it.

“Good.” The man in black smiled. “That means it was done correctly.”

Carus held the mask up close and squinted at it. It was an ugly thing, incredibly real, with wrinkles in the dark wood that mimicked those on a furiously scrunched face. “What are they?”

“It is the language of demons.” The man paused and chuckled at the younger man’s shock. “Or, more precisely, it is the script ancient scholars created to interpret demonic speech. It has been translated through many different alphabets and languages, but this is the oldest form we know.”

“What does it say?” Carus asked. He wanted to drop the thing into the fire. He wanted to finish the project and see what would happen.

“Best you not know. Even the Magi fear some knowledge.”

Carus set the mask down reluctantly and looked at the unfinished frame. There was still more carving to do, and joints to fix, and ropes to tie. The polishing alone would take…

“I need more time,” he said.

“I do not need you to rush this,” the wizard said. “The work of a master should not be rushed.”

“I’m no master.” Carus winced. His father had been the master. Not the man who’d given him his name — that man had been a drunk and a lout. No, he was thinking of the intense old woodcarver who’d taken him in after the war. He’d been a harsh man and withdrawn, but he’d been kind to a hungry orphan and taught him to love making things.

And then that monster killed him. I had him in my reach. Why didn’t I…

The image of the man in red flashed through Carus’s thoughts. He couldn’t get it out of his thoughts. He’d known it was him the moment he laid eyes on him outside Fife. He’d been enormous, a towering thickset brute with scars on his face. He’d worn black armor and a red cloak, just like in the stories, and he’d had eyes that shone like molten gold.

A killer. A monster.

Carus hadn’t been there the night his master died, and he would never forgive himself for that. He remembered when he’d learned what happened. His master had gone out and told Carus not to follow, but he’d known something was wrong. A strange woman had visited them, and she’d reeked of madness and power. Another highborn, but this one more like the changeling beggars who sometimes crawled up out of Garihelm’s drains. Uncanny, with a sense of something subtly wrong, something inhuman.

The old man had been scared. He’d taken his best puppets, the ones he used for his other work. The ones he wasn’t supposed to have.

Carus knew how to do more than carve wood. He knew how to make it alive again, how to make metal balls move like the joints in spry limbs and rope like strong muscle. It was a forbidden art, a taboo practice. Ignorant people called them necromancers, but it just went to show they didn’t know anything.

They might use new techniques for the vessels, but the magic itself was old. They were the descendants of the same hedge-witches and wise matrons who’d once fashioned living scarecrows to chase wolfweres away from their villages. The doctor had known this. He’d known Carus’s adoptive father. They’d been old enemies, which hadn’t stopped Olliard Van Kell from taking Carus on as his own assistant when they met in Reynwell.

Carus had been living in the woods, carving powerful new puppets and plotting vengeance. The vampire hunter convinced him that the world was full of many monsters and his skills were better put to use fighting them. He’d agreed — he wanted purpose and direction — but then they met the man who’d murdered his master and all his doubts seemed to crystallize into new purpose.

Now they were parted ways, and Carus had a singular drive. He would kill the Headsman of Seydis. He would do it with the same techniques his father had taught him, and avenge his death.

“You carved this with hate in your heart,” the wizard observed. “That is good. It will help draw the spirit into the vessel.”

“Who will it be?” Carus asked. He looked up at the man then, but as always he didn’t get a very good look at him. Thin and elegant as his voice hinted, he wore a black doublet over a black shirt with long sleeves. There was a hint of features past that omnipresent shadow that seemed to mask his face — some kind of illusion, Carus assumed. He glimpsed dark hair slicked back from a high forehead, the occasional flash of a thin mouth.

“That’s just the trick of it.” The shadow-mask shifted in what might have been a smile. “I don’t know! Most of my friends were destroyed during the war or after it. Kur is gone, and Yith, and Skreel as well back in Osheim. They’re lost to the darkness or prisoners of the Zosite now. Liieshi tried to betray me for that Ark woman, and she has been punished for it.”

Carus looked at the man in awe. “Your friends?”

The wizard was quite a moment. “When you have lived long enough, ordinary men and women become… occasional surprises, at best. These dark spirits understand the same hate that I feel. When they look up at the stars, they taste the same bile that I do. Over these long centuries, I have come to consider them like my own kin. I am myself, I think, a demon in the eyes of the gods.”

Carus looked at his puppets lined up along the stones. It was a clear night, the Living Moon risen high and near full, the air cooled with the death of summer and onset of autumn. Tall stones — menhirs, the wizard called them — carved in disturbing shapes rose in a ring around the clearing, each a different height so they almost formed steps in some spots. There was a small hut nearby where Carus would sleep and work on rainy nights, but he preferred to be outside, letting his puppets soak up as much od as they could. Sometimes, they would quicken faster that way and wake up.

Necromancers. There were puppet masters who bound unwilling ghosts inside their constructs of stone and wood and forced them to serve, but that was a crude magic and tended to go sour for the would-be master. The world was full of spirits that longed to feel, to be, and all one really needed to do was provide them a shape to inhabit. One that could move and act.

Sometimes, he would pull out his flute and he would play, and that would wake the puppets as well if he played well and was lucky.

His gaze once again went to the hideous mask. It wasn’t made for a bodiless faerie or a sad shade. Something older and darker would seek refuge in this vessel.

“Sometimes…” he felt foolish, but he also wanted the man in black’s approval, to connect to him. “Sometimes, I feel like a demon as well. On the streets in the Emperor’s city, during the war, they called me ghoul-child and thief. They would kick me and set their dogs on me. The man who killed my master is Forger’s hound.”

“You’ve stumbled on the great secret.” The shadowed man’s artist’s hand uncurled as though he were unveiling some great treasure. “Those they call the Adversary, the demons and the fiends and the monsters of this world, they were all like you and I once. Outcasts. Oppressed. Left to rot and fester in the gutters of this Creation.” He tilted his proffered hand toward Carus. “Consider that now they are strong, and they are feared.”

He turned and left the circle of menhirs then. Carus knelt by the unfinished frame and got back to work. He needed to make a body to match that devil’s face he’d carved. He’d barely gotten started when the air moved inside the circle and the sound of great wings, like those of an enormous bat, clapped in the night air above him and something settled on one of the rocks.

“He is lying to you, you know.”

The voice was feminine and sibilant. Carus glanced nervously up at the figure who sat on the menhirs without stopping his work. “About what?”

The one who’d joined him, like the wizard, was shunned by the starlight and the glow of the campfire, cast in a veil of unsettling darkness. He could make out great wings tipped in claws like those of a wyvern, and he thought he could see something long and sinuous that slithered along the smooth stone. A tail? It didn’t move like a tail, and he thought he could hear it hissing.

But past those, he made out a humanoid shape. And the voice was a woman’s. She shifted, and Carus felt her gaze on him and shivered.

“He is no one’s friend. Especially not ours. We follow him because he knows the spells that force us to.”

“They call him Shepherd of Demons,” Carus said. He meant to say the words conversationally, but he heard the awe in his own voice. When the thing on the rocks who spoke with a beautiful woman’s voice laughed mockingly at him, he withered.

“He has wrapped himself in many titles and stories, but make no mistake, woodcarver, he is an envious fox beneath it all and an old, bitter man.”

Carus gave her a level look. “Demons lie. You might just be trying to trick me.”

She chuckled softly. “Maybe I am. Little tricks and deceptions are the only things I have left to me anymore. Do not begrudge serpents their lies, woodcarver.”

She spoke mockingly, like she meant to challenge him into being angry, but…

“Why do you sound so sad?” Carus asked.

It was perhaps a foolish thing to say to a demon, but his father had been a priest and he’d hated his father from the moment he was old enough to feel hate. Growing up as an orphan beggar and then an apprentice puppet-maker and spirit-binder, he’d never bothered learning aversion to the Adversary. He was usually too busy being hungry.

The demon was quiet for a very long time. Carus felt he should feel afraid, only he’d heard the melancholy in her voice and observed the weariness in her posture. Even when what he’d believed to be a tail drifted close enough to the campfire’s light that he could see it was a serpent, deeply red and copper-eyed with a flicking forked tongue, he did not feel afraid.

“I am tired,” the shadow atop the menhirs said in a voice barely louder than a whisper.

Carus nodded, though he didn’t understand and couldn’t.

The demon stirred, and something in its voice changed. “I am angry.”

“At who?” The woodcarver asked.

Another small laugh. “I think you are too young to understand. Have you ever loved, woodcarver?”

Carus’s hand gripped his carving knife tighter. “Yes. My master… my father. He was taken from me.” After a pause he spoke with more heat. “The Headsman killed him at Garihelm.”

He felt the demon look at him. “And you will have revenge?” It asked.

He looked at his puppets lined up against the rocks. The firelight danced over the faces of devils and irks carved in wood. There were weapons stacked on the grass as well. Crossbows and blades that would fit in hidden compartments. Poisons. Worse.

“I’ll kill him,” Carus swore, not for the first time. “I could have done it at Carreweir if that old fool hadn’t lost his stomach…”

He recalled the argument he had with Doctor Olliard after the events in Tall Carreweir. They had a plan. A plan to destroy the infestation, punish the cowardly nobles, and get Carus’s revenge all in one stroke. He’d never imagined himself as a rebel or a revolutionary, but his master had been an assassin as well as a toymaker and he hadn’t felt the appropriate awe towards the High Houses since he was a small child.

And as for the Church, and God… well, it was Reynard who’d promised him his revenge.

He started carving again, and realized the demon was staring at him and hadn’t spoken in some time. He glanced at the shape atop the rocks out of the corner of his eye. Its admission that it didn’t follow the wizard willingly made him cautious.

“Revenge can have a sweet taste,” the demon finally said. “And a bitter one. Your enemy has beaten many of us. Raath El Kur, Yith, Skreel, Liieshi… all gone now.”

Carus recalled something Reynard had told him and lifted his head. “Didn’t you fight him? And you’re still here…”

He considered then that he might not be the only one who wanted revenge on the man in red. He realized that he might not even be the one who wanted it most.

Doesn’t matter, he told himself. So long as he dies, that will be fine.

“I am here because I was dragged back,” the demon said. “But yes, I also long for satisfaction. Finish your puppets, woodcarver. Reynard has a special plan for them.”

With that final comment, it spread its wings and vanished into the night. Carus paused his work and stared into the darkness. He was only a piece of something larger, he knew, and he was alright with that. He’d liked the idea of helping people as Olliard’s assistant, and perhaps he could still make a good monster hunter.

He needed to kill his own monster first. He started carving again with renewed vigor, slicing and cutting, shaping and murmuring ritual words full of his own longing for justice that would call a kindred spirit to take residence in the shell he teased from the wood.

He had an idea on how to do wings, but he’d need more materials.