by Logan Jacobs
“Subtle,” I commented and I dug out a treat for Merlin from my pack before I turned back to the others. “Alright, so these aren’t typical revenants, remember. We have to dismember them or burn them to keep them down.”
“Not a problem, boss,” Dehn replied with a grin as he brandished his swords. The halfling cackled. “Finally! I’ve been waiting all day for this! It’s been so long since we’ve had a good fight!”
“It’s barely been twenty-four hours since we fought those cultists and that lich,” Aerin said with a frown.
“Well I missed half of that, now didn’t I?”
“He needs more stimulation,” Maruk murmured to me. “Perhaps we could get him a treadwheel or throw a ball around in an open field for him to chase.”
“Talk to Aerin about it,” I replied as I tried not to grin. “Everyone ready?”
“Ready,” Aerin and Lena confirmed. The healer had her axe drawn, and the alchemist had vials of combustible liquid in each hand.
Maruk checked the straps on his shields and then gave me a nod. “Shall I take point, then?”
“After you,” I answered with a sweep of my hand toward the door.
Maruk tried the handle, but the hinges had rusted so much over the years that even he couldn’t get the door to budge.
“What’s the hold up now?” Dehn demanded.
“If you could find it within yourself to wait just a moment,” Maruk said with forced patience, “the door is stuck.”
“So unstick it!” Dehn ordered.
“Yes, of course!” Maruk rolled his eyes. “Why didn’t I think of that? Here I thought we’d have to just go home.” He took a step back from the door, and the rest of us moved back as well. Then the orc drew himself up with an air of importance and centered his larger shield with his shoulder behind it.
“Let’s do this!” Dehn insisted.
Maruk spared the halfling an annoyed look before he charged at the door. The rotting wood crumpled like tissue paper on impact and the splintered sections fell to the ground with a series of hollow sounds.
“Yes!” Dehn cheered, and before any of us could remind him that Maruk was supposed to go first, he darted past the orc and into the darkness beyond.
“He’ll be fine,” Aerin said as she conjured up a ball of hazy yellow light in her free hand.
Maruk took the lead with Aerin behind him to provide some light, and Lena, Merlin, and I took up the rear. Even with Aerin’s light, it was almost too dark to see anything but a few stone stairs ahead that led down to the crypt below, and I could hear Dehn’s enthusiastic taunts and war cries as they echoed off the walls ahead. I thought he was just warming up, but then he gave a startled grunt and there came a series of thuds followed by the clatter of metal on stone.
Maruk glanced back at us over his enormous shoulder.
“I think he fell down the stairs,” Aerin whispered.
A stream of muttered curses from down below served to confirm Aerin’s theory, and Maruk led us down as quickly as he dared until we reached the lower floor where the halfling glowered as he dusted himself off and picked up his swords.
“Are you okay?” Aerin asked, and I could hear the note of amusement in her tone.
“You know halflings don’t have stairs in our homes,” Dehn replied sourly. “Stupid invention. An accident waiting to happen. I don’t know what it is with humans and stairs.”
“You’re the one who ran ahead without a light,” Maruk pointed out.
“And crypts!” Dehn went on. “Whatever happened to the good old days when people just died out in the open? Why is it that everyone needs to dig a gods-damned well to put their old shit in?” The halfling’s incensed speech rang off the stone walls around us, and beneath it, I thought I caught another sound, a soft shuffle.
He had a point, though. It had been nagging at me, too, how strangely similar this mission was turning out to be to the bounty we’d just completed for the Mage Academy. Two crypts full of the undead in under forty-eight hours had to be some kind of record. It could just be a coincidence. It probably was, but I couldn’t help the feeling in my gut that there was something else going on. I was distracted from the thought, however, when I heard the shuffling sound again.
“Shh!” Maruk clamped a large green hand over Dehn’s mouth and cut off the rest of the halfling’s rant about human architecture as Aerin crept forward and raised her hand to allow the light she’d summoned to illuminate the corridor before us.
As soon as she did, I realized with a chill that I’d been hasty in comparing this mission to the last, because before us were not the bones of humans or walking corpses. There was no lich and no necromancer. No, the darkness beyond was filled with dozens upon dozens of glowing eyes. In the space of a second, I made out about two dozen strange, squashed faces that were almost human but not quite. Thick hair grew over most of the creature’s faces, and their tiny eyes seemed to all blink in unison. What concerned me the most, however, was that they were all hanging upside down from the ceiling, their hands and clawed feet wrapped in white-knuckled grips over the old support beams.
“What the--” Aerin started, but before the elf could finish, the creatures exploded from their perches in a flurry of leathery wings, and Aerin’s words were drowned out by their ear-splitting shrieks.
There came a series of heavy thunks as several of the things smacked into Maruk’s raised shields and tumbled away across the flagstones, but they were quick to recover and ambled forward with incredible speed on their short, bowed legs.
Half my mind was still preoccupied with processing what exactly these creatures were as I summoned mana to my dagger and stabbed one in the throat as it leapt for me. It fell away with a wet gurgle, and I took half a step back to steady myself as I took in the rest. They were all closer in size to Dehn than the rest of us, and though the halfling was about as hairy as any of them, I knew they were something else entirely, and they certainly weren’t the revenants that we had been expecting. They were like the failed experiments of some illegal lab in a B-list horror movie, hybrid bat-people that looked at once too much like monsters and too much like humans to be convincing as either.
Triangular sections of thin, leathery skin spanned from their wrists to their rib cages, too small to be proper wings, and threaded with visible veins where the light shone through them. Their noses were squashed up like pugs’ and when they opened their mouths, they revealed dozens of needle-sharp teeth. A few of them had scraps of moldy cloth strung around their necks and chests, which gave the disturbing impression of clothes.
Dehn roared as he hacked away at one that he’d killed, and spurts of dark red blood splattered over him. There was a sickening sound of tearing skin as he punctured one of the things’ wings, but it was enough to get my head back in the fight, and I turned back to the bat-creature I’d stabbed just as it began to twitch.
Stabbing a charging bat-person was one matter, and it was really mostly an act that was guided by instinct, but hacking the same creature into pieces while it was only partially dead was different. I didn’t share Dehn’s delight in dismembering things, and I felt awkward as I leaned over the creature and cut through its shoulder. At least that was easily done thanks to my mana blade, but I still had the uncanny feeling of being in some nightmare version of my tenth-grade biology class on dissection day.
I worked quickly and methodically to dismember the monster at my feet as blood seeped through the grooves in the stone floor and pooled around my boots. The stench of viscera and the moldy, musky odor of the bat-people seemed to catch in my throat, and I could smell it even when I breathed through my mouth.
Dehn was having the time of his life, and he hardly needed to slow down to hack away at limbs and heads and otherwise reduce our foes into piles of fleshy, furry gore. Merlin nearly filled the corridor in the form of a large, black gryphon, and he gave the halfling a run for his money as he snapped up the bat-people in his powerful beak and swallowed them whole, or tore them
to shreds with his wickedly curved talons. The air was thick with sprays of blood and the anguished cries of the bat-people that fell victim to the puca.
Maruk held back the rest of the horde while Aerin and Lena took on those that slipped past the orc’s defenses, Aerin with her axe, and Lena with one of the ceremonial daggers that we’d gotten from the cultists the day before. They worked in tandem, and Lena would quickly dispatch one of the bat-people with a well-placed stab or cut across the throat, and Aerin would use her axe to cut it up. They worked quickly, but the bat-people still outnumbered us, and Maruk was having trouble stemming the tide as the things piled on.
There was a scrabble of claws on metal and a high-pitched shriek as three of the monsters vaulted over Maruk’s head and descended on Aerin, Lena, and me. For a moment, the world was nothing but hair, leathery wings, and the sickly stench of mold and sweat as the creatures crashed into us, and I was nearly knocked off my feet. Unable to make sense of anything by sight in the dimness and flurry of battle, I had to rely on touch alone. I grabbed one of the things by its scrawny, hairy arm and slid my dagger between its ribs as Aerin hauled back another and buried her axe in its back. I stabbed the next one in the head, and Lena spared me a relieved smile as I pulled the creature’s corpse up and severed its arm at the shoulder.
“What are these things?” Aerin breathed as she wiped her hand across her face and smeared the blood that had speckled her cheeks like freckles. The floor at her feet was so coated in blood that the stones glistened a deep red in the faint light that still hovered over the healer’s shoulder.
“I’ve never seen anything like them,” Lena answered just as another of the creatures lunged forward with its strange, lurching steps, fangs bared to latch onto the alchemist’s arm. Lena was quick, though, and slid her dagger between the monster’s beady eyes before it could close its jaws. Then she slid her blade free and began to slice off the monster’s head.
“Neither have I,” Maruk grunted as he swatted back one of the bat-people with one shield and crushed a second one into the flagstones with the pointed end of the other, “and I should like never to see them again.”
Further down the corridor, nearly out of the reach of the light, Merlin made a gagging sound. The gryphon-puca braced his legs and lashed his leonine tail as he wheezed, then heaved up a mess of barely digested bat-person bits and yellowish bile.
“Augh! Really?” Maruk groaned. Then, as he got a closer look at the contents of the puca’s stomach where they’d spilled across the floor, his groan of disgust became a scoff. “My goodness, is that my lace cravat? I thought I’d lost it! You wretched little--”
The rest of the orc’s admonishment was lost when two more of the bat-people charged at him, and he smacked them back with renewed vigor. There was a startling crack as he hit a particularly large one with a hard bash of his shield, and it flew back so far down the corridor that its body was lost in the darkness. Merlin snapped his beak and pounced after it.
“Oh, and now I suppose he’s going to eat himself sick again,” the orc muttered. “My cravat and all that cheese weren’t enough for the little beast.”
“You must have done something to offend him,” Aerin said with a grunt as she cleaved one of the dead bat-people in two.
A quick glance around told me that aside from the one whose guts Merlin was probably tearing out down the hall, there were only five of the creatures left. Dehn grappled with one on the floor, and the monster let out a choked screech as the halfling tossed aside his swords and throttled it with his bare hands.
“I’ve done no such thing!” Maruk insisted. He breathed out in an exasperated huff as he crushed another of the bat-people against the wall with his shield. “He just started picking on me.”
“Who painted his nails last week?” I asked as I cut through the vertebrae of the nearest dead monster and let its severed head fall to the floor. Maruk turned to me with a hurt look.
“Emerald green is his color!” he gasped.
“He must not think so,” Lena replied. She rounded on one of the remaining bat-people just as it leapt for her and drove her dagger up through its jaw.
Aerin cut the legs out from beneath the next monster with a sweep of her axe and I stabbed the second between the shoulder blades.
“You should probably give him some sort of peace offering,” the healer advised, and she brought her axe down to cut off the arms of the bat-person she’d killed. “Maybe some of that cheese he likes.”
“I suppose.” Maruk sighed and struck the last of the bat-people on the head so hard that its neck snapped back on the impact. “I still think it’s too good for a creature that eats bugs, but if that’s the cost of saving the rest of my wardrobe, I shall readily pay it.”
Merlin trotted back to help tear up the last of the corpses with bits of furry flesh stuck between his talons, and by the time we’d finished, the corridor looked like Sweeney Todd’s basement.
“That was fun!” Dehn skewered an eyeball on the tip of his sword and tossed it into the air for Merlin, who snatched it up before it could hit the ground.
“One of these days, I am going to introduce you to the simple pleasure of a good book and a warm cup of tea,” Maruk said. “I believe the works of Tlanan Mortos could have a very good influence on you. I sense that you have a lot of repressed feelings and that’s why you’re so prone to displays of extreme violence.”
“Ugh, stop, I’m falling asleep already,” the halfling replied as he shook bits of gore from his sword.
“Come on, you two,” I said, “we’re not finished here.”
The corridor led down to a set of sturdy double doors, and Maruk waved us back as he prepared to charge them. They didn’t appear to have any sort of enchantment over them, but they were expertly crafted and barely shuddered against the orc’s assault.
“Go again!” Dehn said. “You’re not putting enough of your weight behind it!”
“By all means, you break down the door, if you know so much about it,” Maruk replied testily.
“Oh, I’ll show you how it’s done!” Dehn shot back, but before he could make good on his promise, Lena glided past the pair to the doors and tugged lightly on the handle. The door swung open immediately.
“Oh, er, yes, of course,” Maruk stuttered. “It opens inward. Right.”
Aerin giggled and patted the orc on the arm as she strode past him through the door. I followed with Merlin, and Maruk and Dehn trailed along behind us as we stepped into a small room with two halls that led off to the left and right.
“Which way from here?” Lena asked.
“Merlin?” I prompted, and the puca, still in gryphon form, raised his head to sniff the air for a moment before he started down the left-hand hall. It was just as dark and grimy as the first, and I scanned the shadows over Merlin’s shoulders for more glowing eyes or other dangers as we walked, but the further that the puca led us through the halls, the more that it became clear that the bat-people we had encountered had all cloistered themselves in that first room. I wondered if they were simply unable to access the rooms beyond, or if only some of the corpses had been turned into monsters, but whatever the case, the rest of the crypt was as desolate as the ruins above them.
Finally, Merlin stopped before a stone door that was almost as tall as Maruk. I could see the faint purple glimmer of an enchantment over it and the etchings of old runes. I didn’t know what the runes meant, but I didn’t need to in order to dispel the enchantment, and it evaporated as soon as I placed my palm on the door and sent a bit of my own magic into it. Almost at once, there was a low, grinding rumble, and the door slid up and into a gap in the ceiling.
Aerin’s light only shone a few feet ahead of us, but the moment the door went up, I knew there was a problem. There was something in the room beyond, something hairy and incredibly large. I had just opened my mouth to warn the others when, roused by the noise of the door or the sudden light, or some other sense I couldn’t comprehend, the beast t
urned, and two enormous eyes reflected the light back at us like twin moons.
“Oh, shit,” Aerin whispered behind me.
“Oh, shit!” Dehn cheered, and the halfling bounded forward with Merlin at his heels just as the creature opened its huge jaws and let out an ear-splitting screech.
Chapter 8
It looked more or less like a bat, more so than the creepy hybrids we’d faced when we’d come in, except that it was the size of an elephant, and as it howled, a gold chain around its neck glittered in the dim light. The beast lunged with incredible speed to snap up Dehn like a fly, but Merlin caught one of its large, veiny ears in his beak and pulled back so hard that the monster’s skin tore and Merlin flapped away with a bloody piece of an ear the size of a throw blanket.
The beast’s howl of rage became a cry of pain as it rounded on Merlin instead, but even in gryphon form, he was fast, and he flew over its head before it could take a bite out of him.
Maruk moved forward to help distract it while Dehn tried to clamber up onto the thing’s back via one of its wings. As far as I could tell, it had true wings, unlike the strange flaps of loose skin of the bat-people, but for the moment, at least, it remained grounded as it snapped alternately at the gryphon, halfling, and orc that assaulted it.
Lena dug in her bag and withdrew several round jars of combustible fluid, and when she got an opening, she threw one out near the monster’s head. As the glass smashed and the fluid ignited, the beast’s terrible face was illuminated in a burst of green flame. It reared back with a shriek and pitched Dehn off its shoulder to the floor where he hit with a loud smack.
“Gods!” Aerin cried as she rushed forward to help the halfling.
The beast was still reeling from Lena’s attack, and it seemed more bothered by the fire than even Merlin having torn off one of its ears. It writhed as much as it could in the small space, then finally spread its gargantuan wings and pushed itself into the air. The chamber was too small for it to go anywhere, but of course, it would be significantly more difficult to kill now that it was airborne without Lavinia or Emeline to supply ranged attacks.
