by Nick Harrow
My claws dug a trio of ugly holes in the backside of the monster’s left calf. The supernatural weapons sliced through the monster’s skin with ease, carving out gobbets of muscle and fat with every swipe. I hacked at its leg with the same technique I’d learned cutting trees for firewood back in my village Focus on an angle of attack, and chop like a motherfucker.
The creature’s black blood splashed the ground around me, its severed veins and arteries gushing like ruptured hoses. Despite the damage, the monstrosity didn’t so much as grunt with pain. Instead, the big asshole tried to smash me with a downward thrust of its club.
While the monster was huge, it was too slow and untrained to land a strike on someone with my experience. I darted away from its club and ducked between its legs, slashing and gouging at its ankles with sweeps of my hands as it stomped around in a circle, club swinging wildly.
“Ohsa, no!” Aja shouted at the monster.
The beast swung its head drunkenly toward the spirit, mouth hanging slack. Some spark of recognition flared in its sickly eyes when they fell on Ayo. The giant roared at the spirit and took a step in her direction.
“Don’t get its attention!” As long as the diseased monstrosity’s attacks were directed at me, I was confident I could dodge out of their way. I wasn’t nearly as certain the spirits would survive. Coming all this way to have them die on our destination’s doorstep seemed horribly anticlimactic. “Hey, fuckface, over here!”
With a roar, I hacked at the tendon behind its right calf. Each swipe of my claws sent ribbons of shredded, rotting meat over my shoulders. In seconds only a few strands of ligaments held the pus-slicked bones of the giant’s right ankle together. Given its size and weight, the damned thing’s joint should have come apart and sent it crashing to the ground.
Still, it wouldn’t fucking fall.
The creature surprised me with a sudden stomp from its jacked-up leg, and I barely leapt away before the attack smashed me into the mud. The enormous club whipped toward me on the heels of the first attack, driving me back. The rusty spikes that jutted from the weapon’s tip swept past my face with less than an inch to spare.
Despite all the damage I’d done to it, the giant hadn’t slowed down. In fact, it was getting faster.
I darted past the reach of the rotting monster’s club before it could bring it around for another attack. Another slash at its savaged ankle sliced away the last of the connective tissue, to no effect. Filaments of black shadow oozed from the creature’s diseased flesh, holding it together.
It was time to change tactics. If I couldn’t bring the head to me, I’d go to the head.
The giant roared its frustration, and a rain of pustulant fluid splattered down on my naked back. The monstrosity turned and raised its foot again, howling in rage when it realized I was no longer on the ground.
I scrambled up the giant’s raised leg from my handhold on its boot and made it all the way to its knee before the stupid thing understood what had happened. The spirits shouted something from below me, but I didn’t have time for anything that didn’t involve tearing this fucker to pieces.
The creature was infuriated by my attempts to clamber up its body, and it let me know that in no uncertain terms. It dropped its club and tried to grab me with both hands. The giant’s grubby fingers were tipped with thick, black nails crusted with filth, and I had a sneaking suspicion the wounds they would cause would fester into a truly nightmarish pestilence.
Best not get touched, then.
I dodged its first grab by scrambling around to its back, my claws digging into its flesh for handholds. Black blood ran down its body from the holes I left, and I gagged at the horrible stench. I’d smelled dead carcasses before, and the reek of punctured bowels could really turn my stomach, but I’d never smelled anything so foul as the blood leaking out of the giant motherfucker.
The rotting beast’s putrid hands tried to scrape me off its back, with no luck. I’d found the sweet spot along its spine where it couldn’t reach me with either hand, and I clung there by the claws of one hand like a particularly mean-spirited tick. The creature bellowed with rage and stomped toward the shoreline in a confused, drunken rage. It flailed its arms in the air, desperate for some way to dislodge me from its back.
I scrambled up to the big fucker’s shoulder and drove the claws of my left hand deep into the soft tissue behind its ear. With my right hand, I carved away a swath of rotted scalp. The putrid skin sloughed away to reveal the brittle, yellowed bone beneath.
The giant lost its shit before I could push my attack into the rotten stew of its brain. Its upraised fists crashed down, leaving me with no choice but to get the fuck out of there.
I dropped off the monster’s shoulder and dug my claws into the mushy meat of its upper back.
The giant’s left fist swept through the spot I’d just exited and smashed squarely into the side of its head. Skin splattered off its knuckles, and its weak skull shattered. Shards of bone sliced through the big fucker’s brain, slicing through whatever was left between its ears. The critter roared, stumbled, then righted itself.
Unbelievably, that brutal shot to the noggin hadn’t killed it.
“If you want something done,” I muttered.
I monkeyed back onto the giant’s shoulder and took a good look at the damage it had caused itself. Most of its brains had oozed out through the hole in its skull, leaving behind only a gnarled chunk of gray meat at the top of its spine. That little nub of wrinkled jelly was the only thing keeping this cocksucker on its feet.
The monster tried to scoop me off its shoulder, and the flailing attempt crushed the crown of its skull. Moonlight poured down through the mist, bathing my target in silver light.
“Nighty-night,” I growled, and carved the last bit of brain out of the giant’s head.
Its knees buckled, and the giant fell. I rode its shoulder down, and we hit the ground with a meaty thud and a liquid squirt.
I rolled free of the impact and bounced back up on my heels, looking for my war club.
The spirits rushed up just as I retrieved my weapon from where I’d dropped it in the grass. There was goop smeared all over me, and chunks of rotten meat were glued to my chest and shoulders. That didn’t stop Ayo or Aja from throwing their arms around me and smothering me with kisses.
“I’m okay,” I said. “You two must have seriously strong stomachs to come anywhere close with this gruesomeness all over me.”
That got a chuckle from the two of them. The humor didn’t last long, though, as Ayo lowered herself to her knees next to the monstrosity’s pulped head. She brushed her fingers across the ruin of its brow, and a quiet sob shook her shoulders.
“Ohsa,” Aja said with a quiet sigh, “was a friend. She was one of our mistress’s guardians.”
“Your mistress kept that thing as a guardian?” It was hard to see the creature I’d killed as anything more than a hideous monster incapable of anything but destruction.
“She wasn’t like this when we left.” Ayo stood, brushed her hands clean on her armor, and reached out to take my hand. She reached out for Aja, who took the other hand. “Things are worse now. We have to be careful.”
Great.
“We need to go to our mistress.” Ayo pulled us along with surprisingly strong strides. Close to the end of her quest, she was eager to finish this thing.
The temple was built from white stone, and it was covered with thick vines. This close, we saw that the pillars were cracked, some of them fallen, and there was a gaping hole where the door should have been.
“Oh, no,” Ayo sobbed. “What happened?”
“This was sealed when we left,” Aja whispered.
The main door, a thick stone slab twice my height and at least eight feet wide, had been destroyed. The white rock rubble lay on the ground in front of the temple, the jagged stones already surrounded by growing grass and coated with a thin layer of mossy slime. The temple was wide open and looked more like a tomb than
a place of worship.
My heart raced as I stepped forward and raised my war club.
Someone had beaten us to the spirits’ mistress.
Chapter Twenty-Three
THE SPIRITS WERE SO distraught over what we’d seen on the island so far that I wanted them to wait outside until I could survey the damage inside the temple. Ayo’s face was streaked with tears, and Aja’s jaw was clenched so tight I heard her teeth grinding over the splash of the lake’s waters against the shore.
“You can’t go in there alone,” Aja said. “We can’t lose you, too.”
My heart ached at the defeated resignation in the spirit’s voice. She’d already decided her mistress was dying, and the grief had nearly broken her. Ayo sobbed when she heard her companion’s words and buried her face in her hands.
“He’s not going alone,” Yata cawed. “I’ll keep an eye on him. We’ll be back. Soon.”
And, with that, my familiar flapped its wings and flew through the shattered door into the temple.
“If you see anything out here, yell,” I said. “I’ll come running.”
Ayo nodded, and another sob racked her shoulders. Aja said nothing. She shrugged and turned toward the south side of the lake, peering into the gloom as if she could see our enemies through all that mist.
My nerves jumped and my muscles tightened as I entered the temple. Someone, or more likely something, had done a lot of damage in there. The entryway’s walls had once been decorated with intricate inscriptions and an ornate frieze near its ceiling. Now the walls were cracked and crumbling, the decorative tiles shattered and scattered around the floor, inscriptions fractured into indecipherable shards of jagged stone.
“Whatever did this was seriously pissed,” Yata said. “You think it’s still here?”
“I sure as fuck hope not,” I said. “One monster fight a day is more than enough.”
We moved through the entryway and into the temple’s sanctum. The six-sided room held two ranks of three polished wooden pews that had all been shattered into splintered ruins. A small dais across the room from the entrance held a golden altar that had been hammered into a misshapen lump by something extraordinarily strong. Braziers that had once flanked the altar had been cast down, their dead coals now scattered across the dais, charred streaks showing where they’d smoldered after they fell.
Even more disturbing than the raw destruction was the aura of decay that clung to everything. Black vines had pushed through the temple’s wooden floor and coiled around the ruined furnishings. Blossoms that looked like bulbs of raw meat sprouted from the intruding vegetation and filled the sanctum with the foul stink of rot.
This is what you left me to fight.
Mielyssi was right, and her words weighed heavily on me. Since I’d found the spirits, I’d been focused on delivering them to their mistress. That quest had been a simple, straightforward objective. As long as I’d concentrated on saving them, I’d been able to ignore the real problem staring me in the face.
Now I had to face the reality of the situation, and I didn’t want to. At all.
What I wanted was to go back to Mount Shiki.
But if I abandoned my true purpose, the corruption would spread and, eventually, everything would die. Including the crimson bear.
If I pushed on, there was a very good chance I’d die much sooner than later.
Once again, I was reminded that everyone wants to be a hero until it’s time to do the actual hero shit.
“Stairs,” Yata cawed from where it had landed on top of the wrecked altar.
I took a deep breath, ignoring the rotten-meat stink, and squared my shoulders. It didn’t matter what I wanted to do, this was what I’d been meant to do since the day I’d ignored everyone’s advice and decided to become a shaman.
“All right, motherfuckers,” I grumbled. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”
A spiral staircase behind the altar led down into a darkness deeper even than the pitch-black depths of Cragtooth Station. My war club glowed where Mielyssi had kissed it, brighter and brighter as I descended, and yet the light couldn’t push the dark back more than a few feet. The blackness clung to every surface and burned my eyes with its intense nothingness.
“Shake it off,” Yata croaked. “We’ve got a job to do.”
“Thanks for the support, dickhead,” I told my familiar. “You could be a little more understanding here. The rug just got yanked out from underneath our little quest.”
“Boohoo, life sucks,” the three-legged raven said with a click of its beak. “Let’s get this over with. This place is giving me a case of the piss shivers.”
“You’re a bird. Don’t pretend like you’ve ever pissed.”
“It’s called an expression, you savage,” Yata snapped. “Try not to be so literal all the time.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said. After close to a minute of hiking down the spiral staircase, we reached its base. My club’s light didn’t show me much, just a small room at the bottom of the steps with a single passage that led off into, you guessed it, more darkness. “I guess we’re going this way.”
The raven, perched gingerly on my shoulder, flapped its wings and ruffled my hair with its feathers. I’d expected a smart-ass comment, but the bird kept its peace. It was every bit as freaked out as I was.
The short passageway led away from the staircase and into a circular room so wide my light didn’t even come close to its center. I listened for any sounds of life, and heard nothing. My spirit sight couldn’t reach any farther into the darkness than my war club’s light. If there was anything in there, I wouldn’t find it standing at the door.
I walked the room’s perimeter, and it took me most of five minutes to return to the passage I’d entered through. There was a pattern engraved into the stone floor, something like a spoked wheel, or a compass. I took great care not to step on any of the etched lines, any one of which could have held some hideous trap.
There was only one hallway leading in or out of the room, though the circular wall was broken by evenly spaced alcoves. Each of those spaces held items that had once been precious and, judging by the glimmers of sacred energy that still clung to them, very powerful.
Now, all they held was ruined garbage.
The only part of the chamber my walk hadn’t revealed was the center, which was still cloaked in darkness. If there was anything to see, that’s where I’d find it.
“No sense putting this off any longer,” I grumbled to myself.
I’d resisted using my spirit sight while walking around the room because my gut told me I’d see horrible shit that would haunt me for the rest of my days. But my survival instincts told me I couldn’t afford to blind myself like that. There could be sacred energy traps, or corrupted shadows waiting to ambush me. I steeled myself and opened my spirit sight to the world around me, positive I was going to get freaked the fuck out.
And I was completely and totally right.
The pattern inscribed on the floor glowed with writhing wisps of black. Each of its lines marked the path of one of the dream meridians, and they were all corrupted beyond anything I’d ever seen. Even the Deepway station hadn’t been this badly blighted.
This wasn’t simply a tainted area.
This place was a source of the corruption that tainted the world.
I took care not to step on any of the lines as I neared the center of the room. Those writhing tentacles looked ready to tear my soul apart if I gave them half a chance.
“I don’t want to look,” Yata croaked from my shoulder. “I’m going to cover my eyes with my wing, and you tell me what happens.”
“Oh, I get it,” I quipped. “You’re not a bird, you’re a pussy.”
“Ha,” the raven cawed. “You’re fucking hilarious.”
“I know.”
The banter helped steel me for what I was about to see. With every step, the light from my war club pushed the darkness back and revealed more nightmares. Blood stained the floor in deep red
puddles that still gleamed wetly in the cold silver light of Mielyssi’s kiss. Small bits of white poked up from the puddles. I peered at one of them, and it took me a long moment to realize what I was looking at.
They were teeth.
A few more steps revealed long, twisted strips of flesh and hanks of hair with the bloody scalp still attached. Whatever had happened here, it had been ugly.
“Whoo,” Yata groaned. “That smell.”
“Thanks for reminding me,” I said.
The slaughterhouse perfume of old blood and rotting meat had grown stronger as we drew closer to the room’s heart. Every breath tasted like a bite of carrion left in the hot summer sun. It took every bit of willpower I could muster to keep going.
Sometimes, I still wish I hadn’t.
A few steps more brought me to scattered bits of armor. My heart skipped a beat when I recognized the broken plates as the same gear the Jade Seekers wore. Greaves and pauldrons lay next to dented breastplates and helms that had been caved in by some tremendous force. Despite enough armor to protect at least a dozen men, there were no bodies that I could see. The armor was destroyed, but it wasn’t smeared with blood.
What in the everloving fuck had happened here?
“I do not like this,” Yata squawked, ruffling its feathers.
“Welcome to the club.”
I found the missing bodies a few yards closer to the room’s center. It wasn’t pretty.
They were mashed together in an arc of pulped gore. It was impossible to tell where one of the corpses ended and the next began. My stomach churned at the sight, and I paused to catch my breath. There was no way the goddess had survived whatever the Frozen Hells I was looking at here. I could turn back, tell the spirits she was dead, and wait for the White Tigers to show up and kill us all.
That seemed like a better idea than pushing ahead.
