The Last Benediction in Steel

by Wright, Kevin

  “No,” he chopped with a hand, “It does. And I want you to understand that if what they said is true. That I … I arrested him afore. That he was to be executed and wasn’t. Just want you to understand…”

  “Understand what?”

  “That I didn’t know. About the whole picture. About this … this thing.” Sir Alaric scowled at the carcass, his boar spear lodged in its nightmare maw, its point jutting out the back of its neck. A lucky shot. “Sniffs and snippets, mayhap. Enough puzzle pieces for a smart man to fit to one, but I weren’t that. Ain’t never been that.”

  “How could you not know?” I said. “You were the bloody justiciar.”

  “I’m only justiciar cause my daughter married a king. Otherwise? I’d be lording over some dung heap east of the swamp.”

  “Even so.”

  “What? You never turned a blind eye?” Sir Alaric spat. “Never figured it’d be easier not asking a question? Mayhap overlooking or forgetting some tiny-little-nothing detail? Something no one would miss? Make your life that much easier?”

  “Not when I was good.” And it was true. When I was a good knight, a good justiciar, a good man, I’d have stormed through hellfire for the truth. “But that was some time ago.”

  “Aye,” Sir Alaric moaned, “and who the hell was I to question my king?”

  A thousand caustic retorts I bit back, choked down, swallowed. Cause he was right. Who was he to question his king? Who was anyone? “What makes them any better?” I asked.

  “Us.” Sir Alaric pinched some pipe-weed from his pouch, hand trembling, scattering it. “Us letting ‘em think they are. And us thinking we ain’t. Give us a hand, would you?”

  I snatched a pinch of the weed and tamped it in his pipe.

  “Many thanks. And what’d you say before, lad?” Sir Alaric said. “‘Let sleeping dogs die?’ Well, that’s what I did. Just, it’s a lesson you gotta learn and relearn that,” he swallowed, “once in a while, those hounds come on back, barking, and baying, and biting. Dead or not.

  “Him. Her.” Sir Alaric whispered. “Them. This — whatever it is — end times? Apocalypse. By the hound, I don’t know. I ain’t no priest. Ain’t no nothing, even when I was something. But folk dying and in droves.” He crushed tears from his eyes. “Dead. Lifeless.” He swallowed, nodding to himself. “Bloodless.”

  “Like Brown Cloak?”

  “Aye. And him but one of the many.” He swallowed. “Strigoi, eh? An ugly word. Ugly sound. Just the saying of it. Dark days. Darker nights. Endless. Waiting on the coming of dawn.”

  “You still jawing about Rudiger? Or the Grey-Lady?” I glared over at the dead thing. “Or that thing?”

  “I paid the price. Paid it with interest. Heavy.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “What’s done is done.” Sir Alaric gripped my arm tight, fingertips biting in like spikes of iron. “I want you to tell Elona the truth, you ken?”

  “Go on, old man, I’m listening.” I gripped his cold hand as he spoke.

  “I…” He slumped lower down the wall, melting like a warm candle, his grey skin waxy in the half-light “Can’t shake thinking on Cat’s last moments. Was … was it over quick? Merciful quick? Or … was it not?”

  “I’d hazard quick, old man.”

  “Eh?” Sir Alaric blinked as he took a breath, his eyes going final blind, “I … I’d hazard not.”

  …and so we, the flower of Haesken’s nobility, journey down into the crypts. We know not what to expect other than darkness, drek, despair…

  —King Gaston’s Journal.

  Chapter 51.

  KARL…” I hissed into the tunnel maw. I didn’t want to be near it. The inky blackness had a texture to it. A slick nauseating oiliness. A tingling. Or maybe I just imagined it, chicken-shit prick that I am. But I called out again. Louder. Hoping I’d hear Karl’s gruff voice bark back or the clomp of his hobnail boots. So I listened. And I waited. And I heard nothing.

  “Fuck…” I said cause I knew I had to go back. Had to check the tunnel. Had to find out what had happened. Had to get the hell out of here.

  “Karl!” I shouted.

  Then wincing, I waited.

  A bead of sweat rolled down the small of my back. There’d been three lanterns with the party. I’d heard glass break. Harwin’s. It’d been burning in a pool. So two left back there intact. Maybe.

  I turned.

  The tomb rose dead center from the chamber floor. An enormous slab of rectangular rock jutting up. As though the chamber’d been excavated out around it. A bas-relief of a crowned king had been carved into the lid. The King stared up at the blazing crucifix of sunlight blaring down. His features were blocky. Unrefined. Journeyman work. Drunk journeyman.

  The lid lay askew.

  Had it before?

  Claw marks scored its empty innards. It reeked of dust and ancient decay.

  Beyond the ring of light, across from the tunnel, lay another tunnel, walled up with blocks as high as my waist. Whoever had done it cared not for appearances, only function. Despite it, I pushed on them vainly, hoping for another escape. One that didn’t entail the far tunnel.

  And the hell-hound within.

  Like a man afloat in a sea of despair, I returned to the nimbus of light, reveling in the warmth, the ephemeral safety. Shielding my eyes, I couldn’t make out anything but the crucifix-shaped silhouette. There was no way to climb it.

  A rasping sounded from behind.

  “Red?” I froze.

  But it wasn’t Red.

  Couldn’t be.

  It came again.

  What the—? My heart jumped again at the sound. The long, rough friction, like a cat having a go at a salt lick. I stepped out of the light, eyes adjusting, making some sense, then making none. Thought it was Karl trudging down the tunnel. Or wished, rather. Even to see that bastard von Madbury would’ve brought me no small modicum of joy. But wishes were like snowflakes, they died as soon as you grasped them.

  A pile of bones sat mounded against the far wall. They scattered as something crawled from them, through them, emerging from the darkness. A shape. Slumped. Rough. Human. Ish…

  I nearly fumbled the boar-spear as I ducked behind the tomb, holding my breath.

  He…

  No.

  It…

  It crawled across the floor, dragging itself along, onerously, with one long skeletal arm. I fancied its joints creaking as It inched toward Sir Alaric. Its hand slopped through clotted crimson, scraping across stone, then retracted to Its withered lips, inserting Its palsied, crippled claw into Its black gash of a maw.

  Sucking then. Moaning. Trembling.

  I swallowed. Glanced over my shoulder, hoping, begging, praying, for another escape to materialize. But nothing.

  The thing shifted again, drawing itself through the pool. Like some palsied beast, It lowered Its head. Its form lay hidden beneath a tattered mantle, bulges writhing sluggish beneath that ermine ruin. Its skin was the color of death.

  I don’t know if It saw me. If It knew I was there. If It cared.

  Its maw split, trembling open, its tongue emerging, the tip of a withered twig sluicing through blood, rasping across stone. A moan of ecstasy crippled forth. Its carcass shuddered as It drank, slurping and sucking and pawing, hunkering, groaning low in greedy black waves.

  In fascination, horror, revulsion, I watched, fingers nigh on crushing the spear haft.

  The Half-King.

  It wore a Haesken crown, but desiccated flesh had metastasized up and around, consuming it all but for the crucifix tips of iron and tarnished gold. It rose up, wiping Its stained maw with the back of Its skeletal claw.

  A warbled groan let loose as It loomed over Sir Alaric.

  I swallowed. Rose. Stalked forth.

  “No fucking way,” I said.

  It lurched around, stiff, wooden, ungainly.

  “Jesus…” I stutter-stepped to a halt, my moment gone. Bravery fled.

>   Crooked and skeletal and tall, It rose and continued rising, an eldritch wave, Its mantle rippling, bulging, contorting, the impression of naked rat tails writhing beneath.

  “Oh holy hell.”

  Its maw worked, mechanical, wooden, as though trying to speak.

  I should have struck, should have skewered It, should have done something, anything, shades of Avar, alone in the Ulysses’s hull, but words dribbled in crimson spittle, sluicing from that gash of a maw.

  “P-Please…” Its mouth worked, constructing word from disparate sounds, its voice echoing in other pitches, other tones, other voices long eons past. It glanced down at Sir Alaric, then at me, recoiling as though somehow ashamed. “P-Please…”

  I swallowed, tried to anyways, tightening my grip on the boar-spear as I set my heel, digging into the floor.

  It raised Its long angular arm, claws ragged and black and chitinous sharp. “Please—”

  It didn’t get to finish.

  Boar spears are made specifically to set against a charge, but they work just aces with one, too, and that’s what I did, catching It bodily on point, skewering It, driving It back. Rat tail appendages snapped and rasped inches from my face as I drove It slamming against the wall. Pinning It. My feet fighting for purchase as It squealed. As It writhed. As It reached.

  Shards of ruined teeth grimaced in frustration, exasperation. “Please!” It grasped the boar-spear, scrabbling at the haft.

  I set my foot behind the butt of the boar-spear, pinning it, reaching for Yolanda in her scabbard as the boar-spear’s tines began to bend back.

  “Please—” The Half-King gripped the spear-haft, snapping it in twain.

  I lurched forth.

  Its nails dug into my shoulder, grasping, and I swung the broken spear haft, slamming It across the face. Knocking It sideways. Almost. The grasping miasma of writhing tail splayed out against the wall, holding it upright.

  I smashed It again.

  Its eyes shined like shards of coal. “Please!” Ripping free and slipping in the blood, I righted myself, drawing Yolanda, the sweet song of her blade ringing free an exalted elixir for my faltering heart.

  “Please…” The Half-King took a jagged step. “No…”

  I swung. An artless, guileless tree-chop stroke, a brute-force action born of fear and terror and desperation. Black-nailed fingers scattered like hail.

  The Half-King raised a warding arm. “No…”

  Another swing and half Its arm was gone.

  And still, It trudged forth, all spare and angular, crooked nightmare appendages flaring out from beneath his ruined mantle, eyes burning black as a midnight sun.

  It lurched forward and never stopped coming.

  And me? I never stopped swinging.

  …my husband, my love, my king, Gaston, against all odds returned from his quest, proving victorious.

  Yet, something about my love hath…

  —Diary of Queen Anne

  Chapter 52.

  I COLLAPSED to a knee on the stone floor, gasping, cursing, steaming in the cold air, Yolanda the only thing holding me upright. The Half-King twitched on the ground, a hacked mass of appendage and horror. Disparate bits wriggling. Parts of man. Parts of beast. Parts of … I don’t know. Rat. Vermin. Thing. All struggling to make itself whole.

  Mother of God…

  Dry heaving, stifling it hard, I rose, shouldering Yolanda, forged of lead, my arms jelly, and hefted her on high. Trembling, I brought her down. Again. And again. And again. I kicked slithering limbs away from each other. Screamed. Hacked. Collapsed again.

  The cruciform daylight had waned, turning from the white blare of midday to the orange rust red of encroaching dusk. I shuddered. I couldn’t to be down here come nightfall.

  “Sorry Red.” I stepped over Sir Alaric, pale and cold, and leaned out the threshold, a hand to the stone jamb, staring into the abyss. Breathing. Listening. Quivering. Willing myself forward.

  And failing.

  Karl was still back there.

  Somewhere.

  The light was fading fast.

  That’s what finally drove me. And I didn’t stride forth like the heroes of old. I was no Lancelot. No Roland. No Beowulf bearding Grendel’s mother in her lair. I slunk out like a kicked dog. At best.

  “I’ll come back,” I whispered, sliding into darkness.

  Yolanda gripped tight, I held her against the left wall, the one I’d followed down while keeping the broken boar-spear out to my right. The minuscule tingle of tip against stone, scritch, scritch, scritch, the sole comfort in my hour of need. I could count on it. Focus on it and not the fact that I was swimming upstream in dark water, surrounded by sharks. After sixty paces, I lost the light. After ninety more, I lost the right wall along with my nerve. Had a moment of rank indecision there in the dark. Of watery guts. A split in the tunnel. Stay to the left and I’d make my way back. Up. Past the massacre. Out.

  But Karl’d gone right.

  He had to have.

  I kept left. Trudged on. Guilt rising in my gorge with each step until I stumbled across someone’s corpse. Harwin, I think. I pawed along him. Over him. Found Squire Morley not far beyond. Could tell it was him by that crossbow. I couldn’t find his lantern.

  Stumbling along, I found Sir Roderick by kicking him in the head. “Sorry…” I lied.

  His lantern was broken.

  “Come on … come on.” I knelt, pawing him like a pauper til I found what I’d hoped.

  I turned around, started back down. Kept my left hand to the wall this time. The spear to the right. Scritch… Scritch… Scritch… When I lost the right I didn’t even pause. I tripped over a stone, screamed, nearly broke my neck, pissed my pants, but I didn’t pause.

  The floor turned from stone to dirt. As though something had burrowed its way out. Or in. I tripped again and swore, finally figured anything alive down here knew I was coming. Trudging around like some jackass.

  “Karl—?” I rasped.

  Nothing.

  I kept at it. Trudging down, down, down. The tunnel getting tighter and tighter. The air thicker and thicker. Had trouble catching my breath with the walls squeezing in. Compressing my senses. My soul. My sanity. The smell of dirt being overtaken by some mottled stench I couldn’t describe. But it wasn’t good.

  Loose soil cascaded as I brushed past it — and froze. Something up ahead… A moan? Was it human? Jesus. “Karl—” I gripped Yolanda and listened. Prayed.

  Something shifting? Sliding? Up ahead? Another moan.

  It was human.

  I hunkered low and made my way til I set my hand into a greasy mass of wet fur.

  A corpse. A carcass. It was the other hell-hound. I won’t say I squealed like a little girl. If I’d had the presence of mind to, I might’ve. At best. The hell-hound was laid out across the tunnel floor, blocking it wall to wall. About the size of a lion. Its body covered in damp mangy fur. I gave a cautious prod with the boar-spear.

  It didn’t move.

  Able to breathe again, somewhat, I wiped my hand on my pant leg. Dry heaved. Squeezed past, praying the whole while the thing didn’t move, didn’t shift, didn’t have any babies slithering around inside. Jesus.

  “Watch it with that thing,” growled a voice.

  Karl.

  My legs went weak. Oh, thank the Lord.

  Karl shifted, grunting, buried half-beneath the thing. “Gonna lend me a hand?”

  I took a breath. A real honest-to-goodness breath despite the caustic fume. “How’d you know it was me?”

  “Heard a little girl squeal.”

  “Wasn’t me.”

  “Right. Musta been the other fella.”

  “Yeah. A real chicken-shit little bitch, that other fella.”

  “Just get this damned thing off me, will ya?”

  “Alright. Watch it. Can you move at all?”

  Karl pulled his torso aside as best he could, and I shoved the broken spear haft underneath the thing, dug it in as deep
as I could. “That good?”

  “Like a dream,” Karl grunted.

  “Aces.” I squatted and set the haft against my shoulder. “Ready?”

  “No.”

  “Alright,” I ignored him, “watch it—” and straightened, levering the haft up, shifting the carcass a mite. Karl slithered out kicking and swearing from beneath its fetid bulk. For a moment, he just leaned there against the wall, breathing long, hollow, hoarse.

  “You alright?” I pawed along, found his shoulder.

  “Just dandy.”

  “Good.” I squeezed. “C’mon.”

  “You seen Red?”

  “Just shut up and come on.” He hissed a sharp invective between his teeth as I yanked him to his feet. “Got your axe?”

  “Rrrg…” Shifting and scraping, the squelch of something being squished. “Odin’s breath.”

  “Hrmm… Gimme a moment.” A wrenching sound, like he was yanking it from the thing’s gullet which is what I was fair sure he was doing. After a moment of skin stretching, ripping, came an, “Aye. Yar. Got it.”

  “Alright,” I said. “Can you walk?”

  Karl gripped my arm. “Long as it’s the hell out of here.”

  “Was thinking of moving in. Raising a family,” I said. “Stay to the left.” I kept a hand to his shoulder, Yolanda in the other. We started on. “There’ll be a hard turn coming up. After about a hundred paces. Give or take. Watch your step.”

  “You want to drive this thing?”

  “No, but I don’t want to be sitting in back, either.”

  “The left?” Karl grumbled. “Heads us back down.”

  “Yeah. Red’s down there. And besides, I found something you’re going to love.”

  “Yar? And what’s that?”

  “A king. A dead one.”

  “Hrrm. My favorite kind.”

  “Not so much with this one.”

  We trudged along.

  “And what are we gonna do with His Majesty?” Karl asked out of the black.

  I patted the skin of lamp oil I’d filched off Sir Roderick’s corpse. “Honor him the old way.”