Book 7: Chapter 9 - Another Interruption (RAW) (Patreon)

Chapter 9 - Another Interruption

The sword returns to rust, the hand returns to silence, the moon keeps its light.

- Unknown Warrior’s death poem from the Land of Streams. 

Our journey continued through the woods, dales, and valleys of Aranthia. Our goal was the port city of Meridian, famed for its canals, Academy, and culture. Or so, at least, Cordelia de Aserac would have me believe.

The land rolled by in long green stretches, misty mornings, and picturesque hills that rose like the backs of buried giants. There were valleys where streams cut silver paths through the grass, forests where gnarled, old trees had witnessed dark things leaned over the road, and the occasional traveler that hurried past us in the opposite direction. It should have been beautiful, perhaps. To another man, in another mood, it might have been. To me, it was merely distance being eaten beneath Theodore’s feet.

And like that, we went at a fast pace that pleased me.

Theodore’s massive endurance and speed grew day by day, the great ceratopsian-like beast becoming more monstrous beneath me with every league. His stride lengthened. His breathing deepened. His hide seemed to thicken beneath the saddle, and there were mornings when the ground shook a little more than it had the day before. If the elves felt any weariness from keeping pace with us, they hid it well. They had enough energy, at least, to learn the weapon forms I taught them in the evenings, when I had time and will to spare.

Theodore’s growth, of course, was not natural.

Each night, I fed my mount poisonous herbs that Larynda had identified for me, letting the reptile sink into something like the sleep of the dead. His breathing would slow until only the faintest movement of his armored flanks proved he yet lived. During those hours, I used Greater Drain upon him, shivering with the raw energy the stolen life energies did bring. 

Each time after I drove his Health to around the quarter mark, I healed my beast. I cleansed the toxins from his body and restored his Health. Wound and restore. Wound and restore. A cycle of harm and repair. In this way, I forced Theodore to grow, much in the same way I had once tried, long ago, in a wagon with my ward Larynda. The memory sat strangely in me. Tenderness and monstrosity so often shared the same chair in my soul.

As for my undead servants, I could feel them for several days as they continued their march. The link between was a cold thread stretched somewhere behind me, tugging faintly at the edge of thought. Sometimes it thinned until I could almost believe it had snapped. Sometimes it thickened again, pulsing with distant violence, hunger, and the obedient drag of dead feet. Then, all at once, it vanished.

At the time, I considered the matter with only mild interest. Perhaps the spell lasted four or five days. Perhaps I had simply moved beyond its effective range. Perhaps the dead had reached the end of whatever miserable work remained to them.

How wrong I would soon prove to be.

The game’s random encounter generator, it seemed, had finally decided to catch up with me.

We had just left an idyllic village, or perhaps a small town, whose name was as inconsequential as what I had eaten for lunch. It had been one of those places that looked at peace from a distance. A chapel bell. Smoke rising from neat little chimneys. Children with too big eyes staring too long at armed strangers. Men who smiled without showing teeth. Women who closed shutters just a little too quickly once we came into view. 

Riding a six-legged dinosaur would have that effect.

Then the road bent into the trees, and yet another group decided to interrupt us.

This time, a woman stood in the middle of the road.

At least, I presumed she was a woman from the lines of her body beneath the boiled-leather armor and dark travel cloak. A hood shadowed most of her face, and a mask covered the lower half, leaving only the sea-gray of her eyes visible. Those eyes were steady, cold, and far too self-righteous for my liking. The sight of her nearly made me hold my head in my hands at the sheer cliché of it.

An instinct honed to a razor’s edge by danger told me she was not alone. Or perhaps I had simply learned to feel such things with senses that were not entirely mine. The forest had changed around us and there was no natural sound. No birdsong, nor the  insects' incessant chatter. Silence had fallen too cleanly, as if someone had drawn a blade across the throat of these woods.

Standing beside the masked woman was a tall man with a long-handled axe held lazily over one massive shoulder. He wore heavier armor than she did, patched plate and mail beneath a cloak made from some monster’s hide. The thing still had small scales along the hem and a ridge of bony spines near the collar. His face was scarred, three pale slashes crossing over his nose and left cheek, turning his expression into something permanently half-sneering.

Larynda called for them to get off the road and make way.

The woman did not move. Of course she did not, for life could never be that easy. Instead, she challenged us. The poor woman might as well have been challenged fate.

“We dealt with a large group of Zombies a few days ago,” the woman declared suddenly without preamble, her voice low for a woman and edged with iron. “The trail of their curse and corruption led us here. To you.”

She was tall for a woman, perhaps my height. But from atop Theodore, she looked very small indeed.

“To whom am I speaking?” I asked as if I had picked up a phone in my old world.

“Before asking for a name, it is usual to give one’s own first,” she shot back.

“And he, or she, who initiates a conversation does best by giving their name first. Your point?” I let my gaze settle upon her and her scarred companion. “My patience grows thin. State your business or stand aside.”

She glanced at the man beside her before smiling thinly beneath her mask. I could see the shape of it in the movement of her cheeks. “Who we are does not matter. Nor does your name. But we want answers, and we shall have them.”

In the sky above, a Gryphon circled and shrieked, as if lending its support to her little declaration. Sunlight flashed along its hooked beak and talons as it cut a slow ring above the road, its lion’s body tucked tight beneath the spread of its wings.

So a company of three at least. Perhaps more behind us. Perhaps more in the brush. Perhaps some archer or knife-man even now believed himself unseen.

The woman pulled a device from her pouch. It was a small, ugly thing of brass, glass, and bone, its needle trembling in a way that suggested it was magical in nature. She held it toward me, and the needle spun once before fixing in my direction.

“The curse trail points to you,” she said. “But I sense no Mana from you. None at all. You are like a mundane.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Yet I think you are anything but.”

The bodyguard leaned close and whispered something in her ear.

Not the small Mageling, were words from his lips that I read with my eyes.

They were speaking of Larynda. No doubt they had ruled her out as the source. I could almost imagine her stiffening above Bubbles, offended in the way only the young could be when underestimated.

The elven sisters, my apprentices of a sort, had spread themselves to the left and right of Theodore. Their movements were casual only to those who had never seen violence prepared well. Marimae’s hand hovered near her sword. Saranea’s gaze had gone distant and watchful. Cordelia had already dismounted, a beatific smile upon her face, green eyes bright beneath the raised visor of her helm.

I waited, letting the silence stretch and do part of the talking.

The forest seemed to wait with us, all leaf and shadow and held breath. There was a way these scripted events wanted to go. Usually in a copious amount of death. 

“Do you deny any involvement with the zombies we laid to rest?” the woman asked. “Those unquiet dead. Do you deny this?”

This time, there was command laced in her words and I felt it scratch across my thoughts. Not a true domination, the voices within whispered. Not an order strong enough to grip the soul. A suggestion. A lesser man might have flinched. A frightened man might have answered before he chose to. But I had faced down Divines and heroes from ages past and I merely found myself growing annoyed.

I was tired of mindless violence, at least when it came from those who would provide no meaningful experience. This apathy, however, was being sorely tested by the inconvenience and sheer brazenness of their demands. Who were these scum to demand answers from me without so much as a please?

Unfortunately for them, they were slowly drawing my ire.

“Inquisitor,” Cordelia proclaimed, the green of her eyes flashing, “I suggest that you bring this matter of inquiry to an end.”

The word hung there like a noose from a branch. An Inquisitor, and Inquisitors usually meant for trouble. The fading memory of the histories of my world supplied that there were few creatures more tedious than those who believed cruelty became virtue when performed beneath the proper seal.

The tension grew thicker. The scarred man shifted his grip on the axe. The Gryphon continued its circle high above. Somewhere in the trees, a branch creaked under weight that was perhaps not wind. With every breath they delayed me, I begrudged them more.

It was time to see whether a bluff would work. “Enough,” I ordered.

The word did not need to be loud. Theodore snorted beneath me and pawed at the ground, gouging the road with one heavy foot.

I raised my visor and showed teeth in my smile. “Would someone cursed as you think I am hold even a small blessing of the Goddess, I wonder?”

I spoke as peacefully as I could, which was perhaps not very peacefully at all. Then I let Silent Casting do its work and allowed the song of Holy into the world.

Not all of it. I was not fool enough for that. Only a sliver. A minor miracle, just enough to dissuade these people from their folly. Holy Aura came from me not as a flood, but as a thin trickle of gold that barely surrounded my armor. It spilled along the edges of the black-gold plate, catching in the grooves and seams, turning the brutal shell of Adamantium into something that looked, from the proper distance and to the properly desperate eye, almost sanctified.

The woman hissed sharply.

It was not fear. Not exactly. It was the sound of a denial striking something it could not easily break. She wanted to deny what stood before her. I could see it in the tightening at the corners of her eyes, in the way her fingers clenched around the device.

She saw the impossibility of it. The tools of her trade had failed her, and the evidence before her eyes gnawed at the edges of her certainty until it began to rot. 

Much to my delight, the pair of them looked positively distraught. Not broken, not yet, but something was beginning to shift. A war of ideas was being waged. The scarred man’s jaw tightened. The woman’s eyes hardened. Their faces carried the look of people who had come expecting a monster and found instead something worse. They had found a contradiction that could not be easily dismissed.

I lifted the Second Horn from its rest along Theodore’s frill and pointed it at them. “Now stand aside, or I will have my Lumashitu trample your bones into the ground.”

Sometimes simple was still the best.