Book 6: Chapter 50 - Behind the Masks (RAW) (Patreon)

Chapter 50 - Behind the Masks

The Change, as the legends tell it, is said to belong to the bloodline of the Great House de Savant of Aranthia. In ages past, so the story goes, one of their ancestors lay with a goddess of the wilds, and from that union some remnant of the wild has endured in their line ever since. Such tales are, of course, dismissed as rumor and peasant superstition, or so I might once have believed, having had the pleasure of their company and hospitality. However, there is something most odd, for among all the Great Houses, only House de Savant prefers to follow a line of matrilineal succession.

- The Fanciful Travels by Beron de Laney 376 AC.

I was led into the inner keep, the hard heart of the citadel. It was a tall, fearsome structure, more concerned with endurance than grace, its mass rising out of the stone like something grown there rather than built. On the way, Jacques confirmed my chosen name for the day, rolling it around on his tongue as if it were a sign. We passed through corridors thick with servants and men-at-arms, all moving at an unhurried pace that spoke of a learned, careful discipline. Our footfalls rang against the stone in a steady rhythm, striking in measured cadence as we climbed what felt like an endless succession of stairs.

At last, I was brought before a pair of heavy doors standing open. They were fashioned of ivory-pale wood, their edges bound in electrum that caught the light in dull, noble gleams. Beyond them lay a hall that looked less like the seat of a lord’s authority and more like a chapel raised for some god. High stained-glass windows lined the walls, each one depicting fantastical scenes of saints, kings, monsters, and battles so stylized they seemed almost like lies made beautiful. The late morning light poured through them in long, fractured shafts, casting the floor in pools of raw color.

At the center of the hall sat a man who might have been Damien’s elder brother, seated in a carved chair upon a slightly raised dais. I did not need my Identify spell to know that this was my main target. He was deep in conversation with another older man dressed in fine white robes and wielding a staff tipped with a yellow gem. Around them stood men in full armor, not the polished pageantry of court, but the practical steel of the battlefield, worn by those meant to fight and kill rather than merely be seen.

Set among them, and all the more striking for the contrast, were young women of unmistakably noble bearing. Like the older man, and like Damien himself, they seemed cut from the same cloth. They shared that same haughty beauty, though in them it was marred by faint sneers and pouting expressions that sat too often and too easily upon otherwise flawless faces. There was something feral about them, something only half-tamed, as though all the silks, jewels, and polish of high civilization had failed to fully conceal the wildness underneath.

The doors shut behind me, and I could almost hear Fate strike up its bawdy little tune.

Jacques turned as though caught off guard by the sound, or by the sight of the room beyond me.

“It seems, Your Eminence, Cardinal Mauros, that you were correct,” drawled the lord of this place. “We would indeed be receiving a visitor soon.”

He sat with an ease that was almost more threatening than open aggression. His head rested idly at an angle upon an armored gauntlet of exquisite make, each articulation so finely wrought it seemed as much jewel-work as wargear. Like the men around him, he was dressed for battle rather than court, but where theirs were mostly unadorned, his was richer, heavier, and of finer craftsmanship, its surfaces set here and there with dark gems that caught the colored light from the windows. Leaning against the side of his throne was a warhammer, brutal and lordly, its head thick and square, with a cruel spike jutting from the reverse.

“It is as the Goddess wills,” declared the man addressed as Mauros.

He rose just enough to seem animated by conviction rather than courtesy, his fine white robes falling about him in austere folds. “He shall come among you clad in your garments of war, bearing the helm of the wolf. So it was foreseen, and so it has come to pass.”

His voice struck my ears strangely. To me it sounded like the dry, sibilant whisper of Rust eating through iron, a scratching thing, faintly maddened, as though every word had to force its way through some unseen corrosion. Or perhaps they were filled with the clarity of a prophet. I had to shake my head slightly to get their notes out of my mind.

At his proclamation, the armed men about the hall did not move all at once, but their hands drifted nearer to sword-hilts and axe-hafts. Their eyes settled on me with the hard, measuring stillness of men awaiting a signal. The air changed. It thickened. It took on the pressure of the moment before a storm breaks.

“Milord,” Jacques said, drawing himself up sharply, though I caught the faintest quaver in his voice, “may I present Efthimios of Qis. He seeks to enter your service.”

So, he was not part of this little arrangement after all. This attempt at poor pageantry. Because this, I was beginning to suspect, had all the flavor of a trap.

How terribly adorable of them.

“Welcome, Efthimios of Qis,” said Lord de Savant, amusement glinting in his eyes. “You must have traveled far, which leads one to wonder why a son of that island nation has come here at all. A curious matter, is it not? I had the pleasure of visiting that pleasant isle in younger days, before the burdens of ruling this small tract of land fell upon me. Tell me, are the Ablonna blossoms still in bloom so late in the season?”

Ablonna? There it was, a snare baited not with force. He was testing me, not merely for truth, but for hesitation, for instinct, for the shape of my lie.

I did not answer at once.

Instead, I called upon Sage’s Sight, letting the spell settle over my thoughts and sharpen my senses until the world took on that crystalline edge that always made everything seem both more real and slightly unreal. At once, I saw more than they had intended me to. Above, half-concealed in shadowed galleries and narrow box-like overlooks that ringed the upper reaches of the hall, crossbowmen waited in silence. They were not aiming at me. Not yet. But they were ready enough that the difference was academic. The tension in the room thickened further. One could have carved it with a hatchet.

But with the power of magic, in his question and words was all the answer I needed.

“It seems, milord, that you have prepared a most welcoming reception for me,” I said, inclining my head just enough to acknowledge the honor without conceding anything. “I am truly touched.”

I had not been offered salt and bread, a telling sign. The laws that would bind me to non-violence. A law that protected both guest and host, and in their foolishness, they thought the absence of it a shield for their actions. Fools, all of them.

Already a dozen futures were flickering through my mind, each the span of only a few heartbeats, each ending in violence. Steel drawn. Bolts loosed. Blood on the chapel floor that was not mine. Yet among them, there was one path that did not merely survive the moment but mastered it. Style mattered in moments like this, and winning was never enough.

“But you are mistaken about the Ablonna,” I continued pleasantly. “They are not of Qis. Perhaps you confuse them with some other bloom, though I think the ladies of this hall might put any flower to shame.”

It was a crude enough compliment by the standards of true courtly grace. Whether the effect came from my delivery or from whatever obscure arithmetic governed by my Charisma attribute, I could not say. It worked nonetheless.

The young women scattered through the hall, daughters of the Lord de Savant, no doubt, gave soft titters behind their fans. A few exchanged glances bright with surprise and amusement. Their beauty was too sharp to be innocent, and their laughter too measured to be entirely spontaneous, but it broke the tension for a heartbeat.

“We are not mistaken,” Cardinal Mauros answered, as he lifted one hand, the heavy ring upon it catching the stained light. “You are Her chosen Champion, and we have come to bring you into the light.”

I let out a short bark of laughter. “And if I refuse such a gracious offer?”

Mauros did not smile. His gaze remained steady, full of that same terrible certainty only zealots and madmen ever truly possessed.

“Then Lord de Savant, together with the forces of Her Holy Church, shall compel you,” he said flatly. “By force, if necessary. Wayward children require guidance, after all.”

He spoke as though correcting a child for bad manners at supper. I half expected him to order me to my room without dessert.

The Cardinal struck his staff against the stone. Chains of light burst from the floor, golden and brilliant, lashing around my limbs and winding across my torso. My halberd slipped from my grasp and clattered against the stone. I felt myself dragged downward, inexorably, despite all my great Strength. The bindings of gold were filled with the hateful light of the Goddess, heavy with her power.

Slowly, with the same terrible inevitability by which continents are worn down, and kingdoms brought low, my armored knees were forced toward the floor.

How easy it would have been to answer with magic of my own.

But that would have broken the holiest of vows: the one I had made to myself. And what was a man worth if he could not remain true to his own word? Still, it sang within me, that dark and deadly thing, begging for release—the call of Entropy, my oldest and most faithful friend.

No, I reminded myself. No.

Magic in this world was as much conceptual as it was physical, or so I had learned from Larynda. Chains such as these would require an anchor. So I did not struggle against the chains themselves. I struggled against what they were bound to.

The very stones beneath me.

I strained. At first, there was no give, but I kept pushing. Either I would break, or the world would. I roared, and the world decided it had endured enough. The ancient bones of the keep cried out as my strength tore the stones free from the floor, old mortar bursting apart in an explosion of dust and fragments. Still shackled to the golden chains, the slabs came up in my grasp like some crude flail. I smashed them down before me, shattering them into chips of stone and broken light.

“Was that the force you spoke of?” I laughed, turning my gaze upon those gathered in the hall.

With casual ease, I unhooked my helm from my waist and pulled it over my head, settling it into place with long familiarity. Its bestial snarl now reflected my own, as I then slammed the visor down. At once, my world narrowed, and with it came a sharper focus. I bent, retrieved my halberd from the floor, and straightened.

“Is this the welcome offered in these lands, I wonder?” I asked coolly, letting a touch of mirth enter my voice, though I did not feel it. “It seems you have not read enough of the old tales about treating strangers well.”

“We know enough of the tales, foreigner, to heed their warnings,” Lord de Savant answered, rising from his seat and taking up his warhammer. “We know a Living Curse when we see one, Champion or not. Forgive me, Cardinal, but I do not think this one can be taken alive.”

Then he cut one hand sharply in my direction. “Loose.”

From the boxes and alcoves above, the crossbowmen loosed a deadly volley at me. I lunged to the left, but against a storm like that, there was no true evasion, only choosing how to be hit. Bolts rattled and sparked from my armor in a hard metallic clatter, my old harness proving itself once again against this mundane assault.

Yet even as I moved, I felt it. I was not as fast as I should have been. The golden chains still clinging to me had stretched downward like the probing roots of some malignant plant. They no longer sought to anchor themselves fully in the stone, only enough to drag at me, to steal just enough speed and strength to matter. That was going to be a problem.

The Cardinal watched with a superior smile, as though all of this unfolded according to some heavenly design visible to him alone.

Then the lord shouted again, and the knights in the hall came for me.

Jacques, I noticed, had a hand on the arming sword at his hip, but he was content to let his fellows test themselves first. It seemed my performance in the practice yard, and my earlier display of brute strength, had robbed him of whatever manly courage he fancied himself possessed of.

The first knight came in with a longsword gripped in both hands, delivering a heavy downward cut. I raised my halberd and caught the blow on the reinforced shaft. The impact shuddered through my arms, but I turned with it, rolling the force aside rather than meeting it head-on, and finished the motion with a brutal strike from the butt end that crushed in his skull, helmet or no.

You have slain a Human Knight. 9 experience gained.

Another, thinking me occupied, rushed my blind side with a bar mace. But I had read his movement before he had likely even committed to it. I did not bother with the halberd. Instead, I lashed out with an armored kick at his knee. The joint broke like kindling, and he collapsed with a raw cry just as his mace glanced harmlessly off my pauldron.

I spun the halberd in my hands with a smooth, practiced flourish and swept it out in a wide arc. Men tried to catch it on shields and weapons, to bind the blade and halt its path, but my Strength simply made a mockery of their efforts. Steel flew from numbed hands. Shields cracked. The line broke apart in a spray of splintered wood, ringing metal, and shouts of pain.

“I see you do not use the miracles She has granted you, Champion,” Mauros said, his voice carrying clear and sharp through the clash of battle. “Or perhaps you cannot.”

Even amid the grand melee, his words cut cleanly.

“Your arrogance, your lack of wisdom, will be your undoing. To come here, to a place so heavily warded, with violence already in your heart…” He almost sounded disappointed. “The sheer folly of it. Even the meanest Acolyte would have known better. That is why it falls to me to forge you anew, or, if that fails, to break you so that another may be brought forth.”

Riddles. More pointless riddles. No one in this world ever seemed capable of speaking plainly.

He laughed then, cold and bright, and I answered not with words but with action. I hooked two knights at once with the head of my weapon, dragged their legs out from beneath them, and sent them crashing to the floor. Before either could rise, I stamped down on one helm and kicked out at another, crushing skull and steel alike.

It simply meant more experience for me. He did not understand, did he? That this was my own self-imposed handicap. The only reason this fight held even the faintest trace of amusement. I laughed back, secure in the knowledge that all of them would fall in time. He thought this prepared ground would be enough. Thought his mortal trap meant something to me. But as ever, my victory was only a matter of time.

Fool, the voices within me declared.

Even now, when I was managing to wring the barest sliver of enjoyment from this dreary little massacre, something always deigned to interrupt me.

Fool. Your Ma’at. The wards deceive even you.

The warning came again, insistent and clear.

No. They were wrong. They had to be wrong. For the first time, they simply had to be wrong. They had never deceived me. They could not. I could cast my spells whenever I wished. At any moment I chose.

And yet suspicion found fertile ground in my mind. I knew well enough that the denizens of this world delighted in cheating. I remembered Larynda telling me she would be unable to persuade the Water of the moat to obey her will. Perhaps the voices were right. They had never lied to me before.

Perhaps one small spell?

No. I shook the thought away at once. That was how they got you. By preying on weakness. By making you less. By tempting you to betray your own integrity. A man who lied to himself became less than nothing.

A Ward does not merely block, the voices continued, echoing now in tones suspiciously like my own thoughts. It can twist.

Cardinal Mauros still wore that same smug look of victory, as though my cutting through the sworn knights of House de Savant meant nothing at all. If anything, his smile seemed to be widening, growing more certain with every passing moment. It was the expression of a spider watching prey struggle deeper into the web. It was the expression of one who was seeing everything unfold according to some grand design of his own making.

There was but one way to test it.

And in truth, fighting these Knights was becoming fiercely boring. I drew a deep breath and reached inward, ready to unleash Rust in an explosion of exothermic death upon the fools who thought iron and steel would protect them from me.

I braced myself to feel the spell gather—to feel that black, unseen lightning coil in answer to my will.

There was nothing. No surge. No answering force that opened up in dark, joyous song. There was only emptiness where there should have been the familiar satisfaction of power unleashed, the delicious promise of my enemies’ screams. There was only the silence of unspent Mana.

A small stab of uncertainty found its way into my heart. For without Greater Drain, there was a real chance that, no matter how durable I was, they might wear me down through sheer attrition. Not by cutting through my Health, perhaps, but by bleeding away my Stamina until even I began to slow.

Still, it changed nothing. I had come here under self-imposed limits, and I would see this challenge run through.

The greatest chains are the ones you forge yourself.

Wonderful. More useless wisdom. They might as well have informed me that the sky was blue for all the good it did. And worse, these pronouncements came from within. Thank you, my trusted friends, I thought with biting sarcasm. The voices, it seemed, were nothing more than symptoms of strain, the lingering rot of old trauma.

Now, the chains around my limbs found the floor again, and this time they felt heavier, denser, more insistent. Not that it helped the next two Knights I smashed to the ground.

Yet, powerful as I was despite this rather inconvenient chain debuff, I could see which way the wind was blowing now, I had to admit. It would be wise to secure an escape route. Just in case, I told myself. Just in case.

Breaking from the ring of warriors around me with Improved Dash, I lunged for the doors and drove an Improved Power Strike into them, meaning to cleave them in two with my halberd like an axe. It should have been easy. My skill was there. My strength was there. My weapon, however, was most definitely not.

Or perhaps the door had been ensorcelled with whatever cheating magic of the day the locals had at their disposal.

The result was that the shaft of my halberd splintered near the head with a sharp crack, and the blade spun free, whirling across the hall before burying itself in a far wall. Growling, I hurled the broken remainder of my weapon, the wooden haft, at Lord de Savant.

He turned it aside almost lazily with his warhammer, a look of almost amused disappointment on his face.

No matter. My hands were weapon enough. I called Manticore Claws skill to my gauntlets, fully expecting the vicious energy and venom to form at my fingertips. But nothing happened. There was no surge, no answering power as my Stamina was drained slightl.

That was when the first true prick of panic found me. For whatever wards smothered this place were not merely dulling me. They were cutting me off from my source of power, that which made me different and above all others, allowing me to be slowly crushed by a heavy debuff. This damn place blunted both my combat abilities and access to my very magic. There would be no convenient burst of power, no hidden skill to shatter the balance of the fight. Every scrap of Stamina would have to be measured and spent carefully. This was a battle of resource management. 

Above, the crossbowmen resumed their work now that I had broken from the press of the melee. Another hail of bolts screamed down around me. Most rattled from my armor in sharp, angry bursts of sound, but one found a weak point near a joint, punched through the mail beneath, and bit into flesh. I felt the sting at once, hot and immediate, and with it, a small but undeniable bit of Health was torn from me.

Even with Regeneration, this could kill me in time. Not with a glorious blow, not with some heroic clash, but by inches. By attrition and death by a thousand minuscule cuts, for it seemed that the golden chains were hampering even that most precious gift.

Fine, then. So be it.

They had chosen the wrong man to test in this manner. At heart, I was still a gamer, and I knew myself well enough to read the ugly mathematics unfolding around me. Every enemy I put down was costing me between five and ten points of Stamina, simply because I had to spend so much force overcoming those damned golden chains dragging at my limbs. And with the doors shut, there would be no easy breaking of morale, no convenient rout, no flood of panicked men trampling one another in their haste to escape. The sealed hall trapped them with me just as surely as it trapped me with them.

Even if I killed every man in the room, there was a very real chance I would finish in single digits. Or not finish at all. So fickle circumstance had chosen for me the hard way. Very well.

I drew the curved sword from my waist and then Zariyah, my dagger, feeling the familiar comfort of steel settle into my hands. For an instant, I considered unleashing Dancing Blade, but before I cast it, I felt something was wrong. The dagger was not hungry. It did not sing for freedom that only spilled blood could bring. It did not thrum with that eager, murderous life I had come to expect from it.

Some instinct deep in my gut told me the truth before my mind fully formed it. In this place, in this moment, it was only a blade. A fine one, yes, but stripped of its true nature.

I ground my teeth in frustration. My entire kit had been effectively shut down.

Fine. Then escape remained the better course. The walls were rough stone. With enough strength, I could climb them. If I had to, I could gouge handholds into the mortar and haul myself upward like some crawling beast.

Decision made, I threw myself back into this slightly cowardly course. I surged through the men before me like a battering ram in human shape, shoulder-checking one hard enough to break bone, slamming another aside, then driving my dagger into the slit of a visor as I burst through their line in an explosion of violence. Death notices piled up in my mind alongside the flood of experience, but there was no time to savor any of it.

I hit the wall and began to climb. At first, it was simple enough. The stone was rough, the mortared seams broad enough for armored fingers, and my Strength was more than sufficient to haul my weight upward. But the higher I climbed, the worse the pull became. The golden chains dragging at me thickened with invisible force, as though the hall itself refused to let me rise. Every foot I gained made them heavier. Every handhold felt more distant than the last. 

I roared in frustration, cursing the Stamina wasted with this futile action. There was nothing for it but to drop back down. With a curse, I shoved myself away from the wall and dropped back down into the hall below, landing hard.

Then the bolts came again.

They hammered against my back and shoulders, ringing off steel in bursts of impact. One skipped from the curve of my backplate. Another struck near my neck. Another cracked against my helm. Without my Mimic shield and not trusting my poor Luck, I had to shield my visor, lest some lucky shot find the eyeslits.

The moment I acted, I exposed the mail beneath my arm. A lucky bolt punched into the gap there, driving deep.

Pain lanced through me, sharp enough to white out the edges of my vision for an instant. Real pain meant that they had done enough damage to overcome the secondary effects of Improved Pain Nullification.

More bolts hissed after me as the crossbowmen above found their rhythm, growing steadier, deadlier, more confident with every volley.

I tore the bolt from my underarm with a wet, vicious yank. It was a mistake, the very action causing more of my Health to drop. Still, with the bolt gone, it would allow my body to heal. 

This boss fight was severely overtuned, I thought bitterly to myself.

Well, they still had to chew through the rest of my ridiculous Health pool. If they wanted a slugfest, a true battle of attrition, I was more than willing to oblige. Let us see if they had enough damage per second to overcome me.

I threw myself back into the Knights, making certain the crossbowmen above had no clean line from which to loose their bolts. I had thought the crush of melee would let me turn their numbers against them, that the press of bodies and steel would choke their advantage. On that point, however, I had been naive and badly mistaken. 

While I was occupied with the man before me, a warrior who somehow managed to block one of my blows, one of his fellows stepped in and rang a round mace against the side of my head with a solid, ugly impact that knocked me back several steps. These men had my measure now. They were used to fighting as a unit, and they were prepared to sell their lives dearly. Dearly for them, at least. For me, it was simply a matter of converting Stamina into experience points.

I shook my head, trying to clear it, and reached for the Mimic that lived in my arm. But it, too, like the rest of my powers, ignored my summons. Silence answered me. 

Betrayal, it seemed, always came when you least expected it, and always in the way that hurt the most, as a dagger slipped carefully between the ribs. 

“Mauros, do something!” Lord de Savant shouted as I turned aside two blades aimed at my helm and then drove Zariyah into another man’s visor. 

“With all due respect, Lord de Savant, I am,” the foul ecclesiarch answered. 

“Well, do something more!” the lord snapped back. “You told me you would have this in hand, that your wards and your magic would hamper him, neuter him. My finest men are bleeding.”

I was more than happy for the exchange to continue. Let them argue while I harvested the cost. Every heartbeat they spent quarreling was another small offering laid before Death. Some in the room, however, had no intention of footing the butcher’s bill themselves. 

“Do not be afeared, Father. The moon is in alignment,” one of his daughters said, her voice sinuously calm, utterly at odds with the screams of the dying around her. 

Yet it carried through the hall all the same, clear as a temple bell. “We shall join ours to their steel.” 

Well, that sounded ominous, I thought dryly, bracing myself for whatever fresh absurdity this world meant to hurl at me. I was growing tired now, truly tired, in mind as much as body. With my skills locked away and my magic smothered, I had been stripped down to the rawest version of myself.

Ruefully, I found myself grateful that I had invested so heavily in brute physical attributes. It was, I suspected, the only reason I was still alive. I caught a Knight’s feeble strike on my sword and smashed him across the skull with the back of the blade, dropping him where he stood. As the notifications of death continued to scroll across my vision, I idly noticed that Jacques had finally found his courage and, in doing so, had met his heroic end.

Then something monstrous began to happen, enough to unsettle even those in the hall who still dared call themselves human. The lord’s daughters surrendered themselves to the Change. Their bodies arched as though seized by invisible hooks, while clothes and jewelry were swallowed into their swelling mass. Then came the sound, wet, intimate, and profoundly wrong: joints wrenching from their sockets, bones lengthening with sharp cracks, ribs spreading wider, and spines rippling beneath the skin in knotted, shifting waves. Their fingers spasmed and spread, nails blackening even as they pushed outward into hooked claws.

Their faces were the worst of all. Lovely mouths split wider around growing teeth, lips peeling back as their jaws pushed forward with a slow, sickening inevitability, while their noses flattened and stretched into the beginnings of muzzles. Hair spilled down their backs and shoulders in a dark, wild torrent, thickening as it came, while a coarse pelt began to shadow their skin in creeping patches. In moments, they had become something caught between noblewoman and beast, towering and lean and terrible, with too much memory still burning in eyes that no longer belonged to anything civilized.

The day, it seemed, had found yet another way to worsen. So be it. At least now I would have few inhibitions left about killing the fairer sex.

My sword felt heavy in my hand, not from the drag of the hateful golden chains, but from the weight of renewed purpose. Mine was a holy work, and it would be written in the holiest script of all.

Sacrifice.