Oathbreaker ch. 10.12 - Shadows Lengthen (Patreon)

Every instinct in me warned that something wicked was coming. The pain in the nail marks on my face, the flicker of heat in my chest, the cold shiver against the back of my neck. The night was quiet, almost peaceful, but it was a false peace. All the normal sounds of night insects and birds, even the telltale splash of fish in the river, had all gone silent.

I turned from the window. Emma, Lisette, and Penric looked back at me. Only Penric seemed to have sensed something, his false eyes distant and his head cocked at an angle.

“Going to be hard to fight anything without our gear, boss.” The old archer shook his head. “I’m not much use in fisticuffs.”

He was right. They’d all come here directly from Emma’s celebration, and none carried more than a belt knife. That didn’t matter so much for Lisette, and Emma could make weapons with her Blood Art, but we were still underprepared.

I reached back into the shadows and pulled out a second weapon. The light crossbow was fashioned from wood cut off my axe’s ever-growing handle, something I’d done so it could be stored in the Ghost Roads the same way. It had a dramatic curve to the stock and the metalwork was reinforced with gold. It already had a single bolt loaded. I tossed it to Penric, who caught it without so much as twitching his head in my direction.

“That’s only got the one shot,” I told him. “My quiver is back in the castle.”

Penric tested the weapon’s weight and nodded. “I’ll make it count.”

I faced the others. “Lisette, I want you to ward His Majesty’s room as best you can. It probably won’t do more than slow whatever’s out there down, but it might buy time for Hendry and Tzanith to get back here.” The elf would sense the same thing I had before long, if she hadn’t already. “Emma, you’re with me.”

“And what is your plan?” Emma asked.

“What do you think? If this thing gets in here, it’ll rip us apart in the dark. So I’m going on the hunt.”

She smiled. “I was hoping you’d say that.”

“What about that bloodsucker?” Penric asked.

Sidsel must have also sensed the approaching threat, but she hadn’t made a reappearance. If she did plan to betray us, now was an opportune time.

“She’ll be nearby. Demons have influence over the undead. Penric, you should have some protection as long as you stay close to Lis, but if the Mabsworn acts funny then do what you have to.”

Lisette and Penric both returned to the room where Calerus still lay unconscious, leaving me with my now ex-squire.

“I’d really hoped to give you a night of peace on today of all days,” I told her.

Emma shrugged and flexed her left hand. There was a scarlet flash, and a curved dagger of crystallized blood appeared in her fist. “I wouldn’t have it any other way, personally.”

I was already armed, but I took a moment to roll my left sleeve up. There on my flesh, just below the elbow, was a sigil formed by lines of scar tissue. The mark was formed from the runes of Orkael, the Infernal Script, a sequence of angular marks formed into the shape of a wheel with nine spokes. I nicked the skin near it with the edge of my axe and let some blood trickle over the scars. Immediately, the spot started to feel uncomfortably warm.

When I noticed Emma watching me, I explained. “It’s from when Vicar and I made our pact. He’ll know I’m in trouble.”

“Can he even move under his own power?” Emma asked.

“If he needs to.”

We moved out onto the street then. The mist had thickened, becoming dense enough that I couldn’t see the end of the street and could only barely make out the moon as a silver-blue smudge. Somewhere inside one of the houses, a baby was crying.

In a flash of insight, I knew then that everyone in this neighborhood was locked in a terrible dream at that moment. Every one of them gasped and sweated in their beds, feeling the same sensation even then scrabbling at the corners of my mind. That had been another reason I’d decided to leave our refuge. There were innocent Karledalers all around us, and I wasn’t going to give the demon a chance to prey on them.

“I’m assuming we’re bait?” Emma said as she drew up next to me, clutching her blood dagger close to her chest.

I swept my gaze over the street without answering. A row of houses bordered one side, and then there was the dirt track of the street and a span of grass perhaps twenty paces wide as a buffer against the river.

The river. My gaze fixed on it. I could barely see the water through the fog, but I could hear it. It was narrow here, and shallow. There were docks where the townsfolk would cast their small craft and their nets.

From those slow-churning waters, something stared back.

“It’s there,” I said.

“I see it.” Emma flicked her dagger into a reverse grip.

Neither of us showed signs of a night of carousing. Emma had near perfect and conscious control over her own blood, and the magic I was already burning cleared my head and cleansed my system. I drew in a long breath, exhaled once, and then let my voice carry into the night.

“I see you, Abgrûdai. This city is under my protection. There is nothing for you here but the pain of sacred fire.”

The water bubbled. I could make out two shining eyes peering through the fog, lopsided and asymmetrical. The thing squatted in the water, fully submerged up to its head like one of the great reptiles of the northern isles. Its voice, when it answered me, was like the bubbling of plagued cauldrons and crackle of sickly flames over scabrous rocks.

The flame in you reeks of necromancy and blood.

Is it truly these dun remains that bested Paingorger and Wingtaker both?

“You know me,” I said.

The wizard spoke of you.

Alder Knight. Champion. Paladin. Headsman.

So many names.

Yet, I see only dim embers.

My eyes narrowed. “Reynard sent you.”

There was a pause that I took for acknowledgement.

I have followed the marrow-eater to this place. I know he is behind you.

Give him to me.

“You will not have him. Name yourself.”

It let out a bubbling, angry growl. The whole river seemed to writhe and grass withered all the way to the street.

I am Daobog.

Emma shivered and grit her teeth, angry at her own reaction. “Always so melodramatic, these Abgrûdai.”

Daobog. I felt like I’d heard that name. Most of the old demons had known names, recorded from before the Fall of Oroion or even earlier. It wasn’t one of Reynard’s original eight, which meant this one had either come out of the far west or entered the world along with Ager Roth when he was released by Alicia and the other Alder captains.

I lifted the black axe in my hand to show it to the dark spirit. “I did defeat both Kur and Yith, Daobog. They underestimated me too.”

The demon laughed. It was a bilious sound that made my stomach churn.

We will see.

The sound of splashing water filled the night air. I heard the squelching of mud and the rasping snarls of diseased throats. Twisted shapes emerged from the riverbed and began to stumble forward through the mist.

“Woed,” I warned Emma.

“I see them. These cowardly spirits are always hiding behind their puppets.”

Or inside of them, as the case may be. The creatures shambling through the mist might have once been people, or animals, or even elves. Every demon played with the clay of life in its own unique way, making the horrors they used as fodder impossible to predict. These looked like fiends who wore the tattered scraps of human skins like cloaks — pale things covered in a mixture of filthy fur and river weeds, with muscular bodies and elongated skulls whose eye-sockets glowed with dismal fire.

“He’ll use them to distract us while he goes for Calerus,” I muttered as I took a step back. “They’ll be too strong to ignore, so—”

“We’ll kill them quickly,” Emma finished.

“Yes.”

The skull-faced things shambled forward, gaining more animation even as they drew closer. They loped on all fours, shivering and hissing as they moved to surround us. The human skins dangling from their bulky frames flapped in the wind like wrinkled banners, flashing the occasional glimpse of a sorrowful face or boneless limb. One of them let out an eerie, high pitched shout and leapt.

Emma flicked out her free hand and sent a spatter of blood across the street. The dirt was wet and drank her blood eagerly. She clenched her hand into a fist and wrenched it up even as she let out an exhalation of effort. Shrike spears exploded from the ground to impale the Woed, stopping its leap dead on and taking it through the ribs, stomach, and neck all at once.

Even that did not kill it. The demonscorched creature struggled violently against the pikes, causing itself even more grievous damage as it fought to free itself. Up close it was even more terrible to look at. It reeked of rotting mildew and latrines, and there were still scraps of skin over its bare skull. Something like a large, pink worm wriggled in its left eye-socket. The worm had a mouth, and it whispered at me…

I didn’t let that voice enter my thoughts. My axe came down and took the monster’s head off. It slumped, but the others were already advancing with blurring speed. I batted a set of claws away with the flat of my blade and almost lost an eye to the snapping maw of another. The foggy night became a flashing nightmare of hellish shapes and lethal motion.

Without armor, I couldn’t fight like I usually did, with sheer weight and steely momentum. I used my size and my axe to keep the creatures off Emma while she used her Blood Art to repel them. They balked from the flashes of gilded fire around my weapon — that at least seemed to frighten them.

A flash of motion in the corner of my eye made me turn just as one of the Woed lashed out with its claws. I brought up my left arm, encasing it in the gold-white light of Knight’s Panoply. The thing struck me hard enough that the auratic glass cracked and fractured, and pain shot up my arm. I stumbled, gritting my teeth, and the monster lunged forward with its skeletal jaws open wide.

The thin blade of a knight’s sword went through its head from the side. Sidsel was there, having appeared as though from the mist itself — likely she had. She lifted the hulking thing up with her sword, using one arm as though it weighed nothing. Her eyes blazed red, and the healthy bronze hue to her skin had turned gray and corpse-like. She bared her long fangs in a silent snarl as she let the dead creature slide off her sword, dropping it negligently.

“Vermin,” she spat.

My attention returned to the pack. We’d killed enough by that point that the rest were holding at bay. They weren’t completely mindless, these skull-hounds, and they were capable of feeling fear. Their gangly shapes moved just out of sight through the mist as they surrounded us, the tattered skins they wore making unsettling cracking sounds as they flapped in phantom winds.

I realized what was stopping them a moment later. About eight paces away from where I stood, the ground seemed to writhe as a thorny, reddish substance coiled over it. It looked like nothing so much as a cluster of crimson serpents moving in sequence, dipping in and out of the muddy street. Whenever one of the Woed got close, a cluster of red vines would lash out and cause it to recoil.

Emma stood nearby, her hand dripping blood onto the street and her eyes glazed and unfocused. Her lips were moving, and her eyes had taken on a copper gleam.

Briar sorcery. She’d been learning new tricks  as well.

Pain shot through the scars on my left eye. It was in that moment that Daobog joined the fight.

He leapt out of the water with such force that the river moved, a wave rushing over the shore and the spray falling on rooftops a hundred yards away. That great leap took him into the sky, beyond the veil of fog and out of sight. The demon landed on the roof of the house behind us with a great crack of splintering wood and shattering tiles. Somehow the roof held, but the creaking groan of strained beams echoed down the street.

The demon was huge. A hulking shape, it resembled some cross between a giant, squat toad and predatory reptile. It held some superficial resemblance to the monsters we’d just fought, with a skeletal head and river-filth hanging off it like a cloak. There were corpses hung in that mane like baubles in a lady’s hair, dead fish and dead animals, a few human bodies as well, all in various stages of rot. Large horns curled down the side of its wide, flat skull to jut forward like tusks. Its eyes were twin embers of green fire.

The three of us faced the abyssal thing as it squatted on the house above us to glare down with ageless malice. Emma continued to chant under her breath. Sidsel let out a whine, an almost animal sound, and took a step back.

“It’s in my head,” the vampire hissed. “Agh… No! You are not her!”

Emma threw me a worried look. I’d been afraid of this. Sidsel had been turned by a demon. She was Woed herself. Daobog must have been communicating with whatever abyssal larvae still lived inside the knight’s undead flesh.

Other voices were whispering in my thoughts then, less rancid than the demon’s but no less dark. I had other powers besides Alder fire. I enjoyed using none of them, but they longed to be let free.

The alternative was that I might have to put the vampire down. Hardening my heart, I eased the pressure on those dark voices in my thoughts and let their will emerge through the vector of my own voice.

“Heed me, Sidsel Mabsworn. You swore your sword to me. That spirit is not your master.”

She let out a groan of agony, clutching her skull with one pale hand. “I… I can’t…”

“You follow me,” I said, and my voice was many voices speaking in discordant unison. “You serve me. Obey.”

A violent tremor went through the woman before she abruptly stiffened and stood straight. Her hand lowered, and the green light that’d begun to creep into her eyes faded. Her voice was like ice. “I obey.”

I hated doing that. I’d committed to protecting the wayward souls trapped in this world, not enslaving them, but my corrupted magic gave me power over the dead and I didn’t know how else to combat the demon’s influence.

Daobog’s neck expanded as it croaked. The sound shook the roof tiles beneath his bulk. I tensed, expecting some kind of sorcery.

Instead, he ripped a piece of the roof off and hurled it. The projectile flew like a bolt released from a siege ballista, striking Sidsel dead on. The tile shattered as it hit and took her to the ground. Emma cursed and turned her attention to the monster.

“Keep the Woed at bay!” I ordered. Daobog’s glowing eyes tracked my apprentice and he crouched lower, preparing for another leap…

Only for a streak of blue fire to splinter the night. An arrow of light struck the demon in the side, causing it to flinch and growl in anger. It turned as a figure encased in silvery luminescence alighted on another rooftop. Tzanith held a bow fashioned from pure aura, another gleaming arrow already knocked. Her dragonfly wings seemed as brilliant as any seraph’s then as she spread them wide.

“Daobog!” The faerie cried out. “You are not welcome here, Fallen Prince of Trolls! Your father weeps at what you have become.”

The demon’s eyes seemed to narrow. “My father is an old fool, made senile by your tricks and illusions. They will not work on me, little bug.”

The demon reached up with an almost human hand and ripped the silver arrow free of his shoulder. While he was distracted, I sent will into my axe and prepared to throw it. I stopped when Tzanith’s voice entered my mind.

We will take care of him. You need to go to the king.

Hearing the elf speak inside my thoughts took me by surprise and I paused with my axe half raised.

Daobog is no fool. This is a distraction.

I bit off a curse. “Emma, help Tzanith.”

She didn’t question it, just nodded and turned as one of the Woed charged to send a Shrike spear through its gut. She was already turning pale with blood loss. Sidsel was trying to find her feet, and I saw that the vampire’s neck had been turned at a sharp angle, the side of her throat purpling and swollen. Even as I watched she reached up with one hand and popped her head back in place, gritting her sharp teeth in apparent discomfort.

The demon was no joke, but I’d have to trust the others to handle it. The enemy was after Calerus, and I wasn’t about to let them have him before I knew what was going on.

And the sensation in my senses, the intensity of the pain digging into my left eye… there were more demons. Daobog wasn’t alone.

I dashed for the house. The toad-thing squatting on it saw me and turned its attention briefly from the elf. Its great maw fell open and a barbed tongue shot out, flying fast as an arrow. I leapt aside at the last instant, and the thorny tendril missed by a hand’s width. I cut at it, but it retreated with the same concussive speed it had appeared.

Tzanith leapt from her rooftop and took flight, her insectile wings beating fast and letting out an almost musical hum. She seemed like a nova of light, chasing the fog away as she launched another arrow. Daobog snarled and turned toward her.

I didn’t see the next stage of their fight. I burst through the front door of the house at a run, then slowed as I caught my breath. The interior of the small house was oddly dark and quiet. I could hear the battle outside, occasional shouts from the others or the shrieks of the Woed. The whole structure seemed to shiver as the demon on the roof leapt off it, sending dust and splinters raining down across the main room. A beam had fallen to lay near the mantle, the roof above sagging dangerously.

“Lisette?” I called out as I walked forward. “Penric?”

No response. I took my axe in both hands and poured will into my eyes, my vision brightening as twin beams of faintly golden light cut through the darkness. The ghost I’d noted before was nowhere to be seen.

When I reached the hallway leading to the bedrooms, a flash of pain in my left eye caused me to lose my balance a moment. I caught myself on the wall corner, reaching up to feel at my temple. My fingers came away bloody.

“Lisette?” I asked again.

A sound came from the leftmost room, the one we’d put Calerus in. I steeled myself and walked towards the open doorway. A bit of moonlight shone through a window inside, giving definition to the darkness and making the motes of dust disturbed by Daobog’s rampage visible. When I turned to look into the room, Calerus remained unconscious on the bed. Half naked and thin as a corpse, his chest moved laboriously as he struggled to take in breaths. He seemed caught in the same enchantment I’d felt fall on the whole street, his face beaded with sweat, his eyes moving beneath the lids as he dreamed ill dreams.

Penric, on the other hand, looked like a corpse in truth. His false silver eyes were wide and staring, his hat fallen off his balding pate and his head lolling at an angle. He’s been pinned to the wall by the bed using the same bolt with which he’d no doubt tried to repel his attacker. My crossbow lay broken on the floor.

A whimper drew my attention to the corner by the window. The shadows pooled most deeply there, but I could see Lisette’s ashen face staring back at me. Her short hair was in disarray, her eyes wide with terror and her hands — the channel for her magic — lay stiff at her sides.

Another stood behind the cleric. The shape was shrouded in the dark garb of a pilgrim, with concealing robes, a heavy cloak, and a hood deep enough that in the shadowed room even my eyes could not see the face lost within, as though the cloak were empty, a wraith-shroud. The hand that emerged from the sleeve to clutch Lisette by the throat told the lie to that. It was real enough, pale as milk, with long feminine fingers tipped in sharp nails.

My skin remembered those hands, those claws. The beading blood on the four marks that crossed my face from temple to cheek had started to run down my neck, and the pain was constant now, a throbbing rhythm that ran in time with my heart.

The hooded demon looked back at me and tilted its head in greeting. “Hello, lover.”