The Last Benediction in Steel

by Wright, Kevin

  A shadow-flash of dull grey steel whisked from behind and into the back of the Nazarene’s skull.

  Thud!

  The Nazarene pitched forward, catching himself on all fours over me. I tucked one leg up and squirmed as Karl bashed him again. Thud! Axe flashing. Thud! Blood drooled from the Nazarene’s maw, his face a ruin of red.

  I shrimped free from under the monstrosity as he dropped prone to the floor, felled like a great oak.

  Hacking, coughing, Karl stood above him, feet set, two-handing that hand-axe overhead like splitting logs. Again. Thud! Bone broke in the Nazarene’s skull, shattering eggshell inward, and he went limp. I collapsed back, trying to catch my breath. It couldn’t. Smoke poured from all six of the wards, the heat rising hard, rising fast. Scourgers and dames bawling mad havoc from inside, outside, all around, feet pounding, fists hammering on doors, on walls, on windows.

  “Jesus…” I rolled over. Coughed. Hacked. Grabbed my head.

  “C’mon.” Karl grabbed me by the collar.

  “Which way?”

  “Not that way.” Karl slid by at a crouch, trying to keep below the smoke, dragging me onto my belly and letting go. “Over here.” He crawled badger-fast back toward the sanctuary. “Was a door back here somewhere.”

  Beside, the Nazarene shifted, moaned, the broken slur of air hissing past swollen tongue and broken teeth, a soft whistling vibrato through crushed air passage. His hand slithered for my ankle.

  “Are you fucking serious?” I kicked free and scrambled over the partition ruin, a broken bas-relief of Saint John the Baptist’s head glaring up at me from Herod’s divine dinnerware.

  Blood pounded in my ears to the chanting from … from somewhere. Jesus. Everywhere.

  Ahead, Karl struck wall. “Look for a door.” He shoved me off right.

  I followed the wall, pounding along, slapping, prodding, feeling for jamb or passage or door. It was all stonework til I struck wood. Door! Hand splayed, groping blind, I felt along it, feeling the coarse grain, the individual planks. “Karl!” I choked, gasped, hammered the door. “Over here! Door!”

  Behind, in the abyssal churn, planks shifted as something slithered across the felled partition. Wood shards fell. A dark shade materialized, limb flopping out wet on stone, reaching, pulling, dragging a massive shapeless carcass behind.

  I shoved open the door.

  “Karl!” My cry was little more than a gurgle, but Karl was through the door and at my side a moment later, huddling past as I slammed the heavy door shut. There, in the dark of a close passage, leaning against the coarse wood grain, I heard it again. Felt it. The chanting. The screaming. The horrid thing coming. “Did you see it?”

  “What?” Karl hacked up a lung.

  “Gimme your axe.” He thrust it toward me, and I wedged it under the door, kicking it in sound.

  “What the hell you doing?”

  “He’s still alive.” I staggered back.

  “Who?”

  “Him.” I spat.

  “I caved in his fucking squash.”

  Something splatted against the other side of the door. Something heavy. Something wet. We both froze. Then the sound of fingernails digging into wood, dragging down, finding metal. The doorknob turning, someone pressing in. But the axe held.

  “Open it.” Karl drew his dagger.

  The door bowed inward, flexing in the middle slowly, inexorably, groaning like an old ship, bound in shifting ice, devastated by degree.

  Smash! The door shuddered as thunder struck.

  Cowardice being my life’s work, “No fucking way,” I came to quicker and bolted past Karl, grabbing him by the collar, dragging him from his stupor, hauling him from the smoke and fire and misery, tripping past chair and table, kicking our way through til we hit the far wall and found another door. Smoke oozed from underneath it.

  “Shit.”

  The door behind cracked under another blow.

  I turned the knob, shouldered it open, a bank of heat dropping me gasping to my knees. Crawling blind then, through glowing smoke, til I hit wall. Karl banked left and I right. “Door!” I found it again, lurched for the knob, twisted it, dropped my shoulder, but the door didn’t budge.

  “Staved shut…” Karl spat, casting about for something. Anything. But there was nothing.

  Again, I dropped my shoulder into it. It still didn’t move. “Fuck.” I glared at Karl. “Where’s the other axe?”

  “In the fucker’s head,” Karl rasped.

  “Well shit,” I said, and I meant it.

  …first light of dawn, armed to the teeth, fifty knights sojourned deep into the vast chasm that was their lair, hoping to catch them amid their daylight slumber.

  It became apparent the strigoi were not alone…

  —War-Journal of Prince Ulrich of Haeskenburg

  Chapter 35.

  STEPHAN GRIMACED as he wound a swathe of slit homespun cloth round the head of a fallen scourger laid out across the ground, soot blackening his mouth, his nostrils, his teeth. Muttering to himself. Gibbering. Drooling. His face was flayed in burnt curls, blisters raised tumescent, scattered across his charred neck, his chest, his everything.

  I looked away.

  He was but one of many. And whether he was lucky to have gotten free of the charnel house or not, I wasn’t willing to say. I was only willing to say that he’d be dead soon and even with his gift for treating wounds, it wouldn’t matter one whit what my brother did.

  “Judas Priest, Lou, what happened to your face?” Stephan squinted up.

  “Fat Jesus, trying to get fatter.” I winced, touched one of the bite marks.

  The leper-house grounds were littered with scourgers, most still alive. I didn’t figure it for long term. “What the hell happened?”

  “I was at my perch.” Stephan continued wrapping. “Watching. Waiting. I watched you and Karl go in. Saw what you—” He paused a moment, frowning. He was thinking on what I’d done to that scourger, Drunk Jesus. Maybe I hadn’t needed to do it. Maybe I had. Stephan worked past it, though, saw now wasn’t the time for preaching. “You were in for a while when I saw them skulking past.”

  “Who?”

  “Gustav and von Madbury. For certain. They were wearing cloaks. Sir Aravand, too, I think. And some of the others. Some of the new ones.”

  I nodded.

  “It wasn’t long after you entered. And it went as Karl suggested. They hurled in burning oil vials, staved the doors shut, then turned rabbit.”

  “Well, I do hate seeing a good plan go to rot.” I ran a hand through my hair, let out a breath. Jesus. Bunch of fuckers. But what’d it mean? Had King Eckhardt ordered it? If he had, then Lady Mary, Abe and Ruth, the kids, were probably all dead. Or had von Madbury and Gustav gone rogue? Or were they acting under someone else’s auspices? The Queen’s? Our last conversation flashed through my mind. “Jesus. How’d you know which door?”

  “I didn’t. I freed all of them.” Stephan rubbed his neck. “Yours was last.” He was covered in soot, too, blisters risen in droves across his bad arm. They didn’t seem to bother him. He moved to another patient, one not breathing, so he kept moving.

  “We’ve got to get the hell out of here,” I said.

  “I can’t leave.” Stephan tucked in the loose end of a bandage. “Look around.” Stephan made the sign of the cross. “So many. It’s cold now, but once the sun sets…”

  “They’re gonna die. All of them.” I kept an eye to the leper-house, seeing in its bowels the monstrous shade of the Nazarene shambling toward me through the smoke. Crawling like a thing. A horrid, broken thing. I couldn’t blink it away, couldn’t shake it off, couldn’t force it gone. I stifled a shudder. More nightmare fuel. “So what’s the point?”

  “Rose of Sharon…” Stephan tied off another bandage. He’d been cutting his own clothes and those of the dead for dressings. Packings. Bandages. Anything. “They need bandages, food, water.” He pointed toward the monk cells set along the wall. “There’s en
ough vacant cells that we could set up a makeshift infirmary. Or one of the nearby houses.”

  The leper-house had collapsed, the lion’s share, anyways.

  “What you need,” I growled low, “is to get the hell out of here before they find out who the fuck you are.”

  Stephan frowned. “I didn’t cause this.”

  “And you think that’ll matter?”

  “I’m not afraid.”

  “Not being afraid won’t matter when they’re scourging the flesh raw off your spine.”

  “Be that as it may.” Hunkering low, he duck-walked to his next patient, a woman. Her long hair’d been singed off half her skull, and she shivered something awful, eyes blind, lips working, trying to speak. Stephan glared up at me. “Brother, please.”

  “Fuck.” I tore off my scourger robe and laid it across her. Then I started shivering. While she kept right on shivering. “Jesus Christ.”

  “Here, sister.” Stephan gently lifted the woman’s head and set a flask to her lips. “Drink. Yes. I know, I know.” The woman murmured gibberish but found the cool metal with her lips and sipped a dram of ephemeral solace. “Yes. Good.” He dabbed her lips with the corner of my erstwhile robe. “We’re missing something, Lou.”

  “My robe, maybe?” I hugged myself against the raw. Karl was off gathering our things. Probably wearing his cloak and mine. Lolling back with his feet up. Watching from afar. Grinning. Sweating. The fucker. “Or our collective sense of urgency?”

  “That priest they scourged and hanged?” Stephan said.

  “Father Demtry?”

  “Him. Yes. Well, I put Red’s feet to the fire after you left the other day.” Stephan moved on to another scourger whose leg’d been crushed. His breathing was regular, rhythmic, shallow. More of a reflexive fish gasp than anything more. The kind a man does just shy of his final bow. “It was over something the Nazarene said.”

  “About Demtry being a pillar of the community?”

  Stephan leaned forward, whispering in the dead fucker’s ear, then looked up. “Seems there were more than a few stories of him taking liberties with some of his younger parish members. And that wasn’t all—”

  “A man in power taking liberties?” Aghast, I laid a hand to my chest, fanning myself furiously. “Say it ain’t so.”

  “True and unfortunate, yes,” Stephan glowered, “but still, it doesn’t make it right.”

  “So maybe he got what was coming to him.”

  “It’s not that simple, but—”

  “Jesus Christ, would you just pick a side? You can’t walk barefoot across a sword’s blade your whole life.”

  “Better to walk across it than use it.” Stephan fixed me with those keen eyes. “Once you do, you think it’s the solution to all of life’s ills.”

  “Pick a bloody side,” I reiterated, syllable by syllable.

  “Whose?”

  “Mine for once.”

  “Yours?” Stephan set his jaw. “Along with the King who ordered this? Your King?”

  “Bite your tongue. Ain’t my King. He’s my meal ticket. And I’m going to sort it out.”

  “Sort it out?”

  “Yeah,” I scowled. “Sort. It. Out.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “What needs doing.” I glared back at the smoldering ruin.

  Stephan slid over to another scourger. “What is it you’re thinking?”

  “The Nazarene. I … I talked to him in there.” I shivered. “He said the poor fuckers he’d crucified were already dead. The ones in the town square. Said he hadn’t killed any of them. Claimed he did it as a message to King Eckhardt. To tell him he’d failed his people. Shake him from his stupor.”

  “You think he was lying?”

  “No. Worse.” I swallowed. “I think he was telling the truth. Jesus. I think King Eckhardt was lying.”

  “So perhaps the scourgers aren’t the villains?” Stephan looked around.

  “I don’t know.” I touched the bite mark on my face. “They ain’t the good guys, that’s for damn sure. But…” I looked down. Away. Anywhere but at him. “Jesus Christ, I don’t know.”

  The scourger’s gibbering death rattle ceased abruptly, his arms crippling back, automaton smooth, nestling in the matted grass.

  Stephan closed the bastard’s eyes and performed last rites, then rose, turning toward the leper-house. It was burning still, but it was a slow burn, a smolder, blisters of smoke rolling up, blotting out the stars. Across the cold ground, scattered scrums of survivors huddled for warmth by their own makeshift fires. “The Nazarene’s dead, isn’t he?”

  “Could have used him out here, huh?” I took in the entirety of the shit show before me.

  “Lou—”

  “Yeah, he’s dead.” I swallowed. “Or, shit, I don’t know… He should be.”

  “Judas Priest,” Stephan frowned, “what’s that mean?”

  “Karl,” I lowered my voice, “caved his head in with an axe, but … forget it.”

  “Forget what?”

  “He…” I closed my eyes, saw the shattered face leering, the crooked brown teeth, my memory so clear now despite the smoke, so intricate, so vile, so precise. “I don’t know. It was dark. The smoke thick. I could barely…”

  “Brother,” Stephan frowned, “just say it.”

  “Maybe he ain’t dead. Somehow. Like with Lazarus. Or Rudiger. Or the Grey-Lady. Or he was, but he was…” I clutched my chest, “still moving. Still crawling. Still coming after me.”

  Stephan raised an eyebrow. “Karl see it?”

  “No. Only me.” I ground my teeth. “It was probably the smoke. Jesus. The stink. The terror. The horror.” I closed my eyes, shook my head, tried moving past the visage of the dead monstrosity stalking me through the hell-scape only to find Rudiger’s teeth gnashing from the other end.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Like I said. Sort it out.”

  “Is that wise?”

  “No. Not even a little.” I took a breath, hocked up some guttural phlegm, spat it aside. “Not even close.” Black as tar. “Never wise talking to kings. Getting involved with kings. Better to be some nameless sod scraping away a pittance in some barren field west of Nod. Thought maybe King Eckhardt was different.”

  “He’s not,” Stephan said.

  “Yeah. And we’re in it now.”

  “I’m sorry I forced the issue. You were right. We shouldn’t have come.”

  “We’d be at the bottom of the river if we’d have listened to me.” I shrugged. “Not saying it wouldn’t have been better, but it doesn’t matter.” Another section of roof collapsed in a shower of embers. “What matters is Lady Mary. Abe and Ruth. The kids. I’m going back.”

  “And then what?”

  “Don’t know, brother. Since when do I know anything?”

  …fully half of our remaining Teutonic brethren hath fallen to their inhuman might.

  Yet we have discovered their lair.

  —War-Journal of Prince Ulrich of Haeskenburg

  Chapter 36.

  OY, YOU DIRTY red bastards!” I hollered up through both hands. “Open the fucking gates!”

  The Schloss von Haesken’s gates loomed above. They did not suddenly, magically, mystically, open. Karl hocked up a lunger and spat. It was black with soot and oozed down the gate, inching like a hesitant slug. Karl’s crossbow was loaded for bear and held at the ready. I didn’t know what sort of reception awaited us. I was not expecting all roses and song.

  “Piss off, now, won’t ye?” barked a voice from atop the gatehouse.

  “We’re here on King Eckhardt’s order,” I shook my fist, “so open the fucking gates!”

  Karl raised an eyebrow at my clenched fist. “You’re doin’ a fine job.”

  “Fuck off.” I didn’t even look at him.

  “Taran, open the gates!” bellowed a voice from beyond the wall. Sir Alaric. “Let ‘em in!”

  “I-I can’t,” Taran’s voice whined. “
Sir Dietrick ordered—”

  “What?” Feet stomped up stairs. “I’ll skin your hide, you clay-brained wastrel.”

  “It were on—” The sound of someone being slapped allayed the conclusion.

  Flickering torchlight followed as Sir Alaric’s head appeared above the ramparts. “Hold, lad. Hold on—” he called down. “Been … rrrg … a stretch since I pulled guard duty.” The sound of a lever being pulled, followed by cascading chain. “By the hound… It’s unbarred. Give it … give it a stout push.”

  I dropped my shoulder into the right-hand gate and pushed. A figure appeared as I stepped through. “Ye ain’t allowed inside!” Taran thrust a hand in my face.

  “Best listen to your betters, kid.” I cocked my head toward Sir Alaric as he pounded down the stairs. “Or elders, at least.”

  As Taran glanced over, I kneed him in the balls. Hard. He folded like a tin breastplate. On his knees, teetering like a cut tree, waiting on the wind, he fell into the dirt to the sound of a cat mewling. Satisfaction, a word that came to mind. But then, I’m a small man.

  Taran struggled to rise.

  Then he froze.

  With fair-good reason.

  “Keep moving if you like, lad,” Karl set the toe-hook of his thane-axe against Taran’s throat, “my axe ain’t.”

  “What the hell happened?” I scowled down at Taran.

  “Huh…?” Taran replied very, very carefully.

  The courtyard looked as though a hurricane had torn through. Debris lay strewn in the muck. A few tents stood, but most were flattened or, at best, leaning last-call drunks, coat tails flapping in the breeze.

  “Mass exodus.”

  Amongst the carnage, bodies lay scattered.

  “Yar, for the most part,” Karl rumbled.

  Sir Alaric was huffing something fierce when he finally reached us.

  “Where’s Lady Mary?” I said. “And the ben Aris?”