The Shadow Age (The Age of Dawn Book 7)

by Everet Martins

  “Senka!” Isa ran to her and scooped her up, her cries becoming a moan. He carried her to Nyset. “Heal her! Not her, not you. I can’t lose another. Please, Arch Wizard.” Isa stared at Senka wide-eyed, face creased with pain.

  “As if I wouldn’t,” Nyset snarled, trudging through sand to meet him, and placing her hands on Senka’s shoulders. She drew on the healing light of the Phoenix, simultaneously directing it to stitch Senka’s wound and to restore her lost blood volume. Nyset watched as thousands of tiny Phoenix tails worked like sutures, drawing the folds of her flesh back together, the scar forming and then smoothed away as if never there. Gooseflesh formed on Senka’s throat as the cooling sensation of healing took her.

  “Utter madness,” Grimbald hissed, shaking his head at Nyset’s side.

  Senka’s cheeks flushed with a hint of red. Her eyes briefly opened and found Nyset, settling to half-closed. Nyset’s lips tugged into a sad smile. Senka’s long eyelashes were thick with tears. “Have to carry the ways, carry the ways. I’ll carry the ways, Father. Won’t forget us, won’t let us die,” Senka mumbled.

  Isa slowly raised his head to meet Nyset’s eyes, swimming with glassy blues. “Thank you, Arch Wizard.” He swallowed, eyes peering up at the sun as if searching for words. “She said she wanted to stay here after this was done. To spend some time in the forges. I think she had planned to tell you herself, but perhaps was expecting her constitution to better withstand the Scorpion’s ritual of passing. Do you mind if we stay?”

  “Of course not,” Nyset sniffed, gathering her emotions back into that iron box where they wouldn’t interfere with her decisions. “I’ll send Claw with provisions. How long will you stay?”

  “I’m not sure. She wanted to make sword. Wanted me to teach her how to do it.” He grimaced as he adjusted her in his arms. “We’ll have to clean it out before we can start, of course. I would wager maybe two weeks.”

  Nyset pressed her index fingernail into the pad of her thumb. “At this juncture, I see no reason why you can’t stay. Very well. If I need you— and I may need you soon, maybe in a few days— I’ll summon you via a Phoenix portal. You must not forget what transpires among the realms out there, what looms.” Nyset flicked her eyes from the brand on Isa’s forearm and back to his eyes, hopefully making her message painfully clear. He winced, and she continued, “There are many unresolved things which must be resolved.”

  “My edge is always yours, Mistress.” Isa managed a partial bow with Senka cradled in his arms.

  TWO

  Alone

  “I don’t believe Juzo likes being alone. He’s tried to fit into this world, and its hatred for his kind disheartens him. His world crumbles, and all I can do is stare.” - The Diaries of Nyset Camfield

  Juzo sat alone in his ramshackle cottage, peering down into the drying remains of an empty glass of red wine. A fly buzzed around the room, the beating of its wings grating at his ears. Upon a weather-worn table was a candle guttering in a pool of wax, a dagger he’d plunged between two pieces of wood some number of months ago, and three wine bottles he’d drained this afternoon, one resting on its side. He stacked the corks in a delicate tower. There wasn’t enough alcohol in the world to drown his incessant need for the blood of men.

  He hadn’t had a proper meal in months. His mind was going soft, holding thoughts like grasping a wriggling fish. Every day was another battle against the clutch of madness. He saw things that weren’t there, spoke to people who were long dead.

  Some days Walter sat across his table, slumped in the other wooden chair, face full of smiles. In his visions, Walter still had both of his hands and eyes. He leaned so far back, the front legs of the chair hovered off the floor, the floorboards creaking. Last he spoke with him, they reminisced about the time Juzo accidentally hit Nyset in back of the head with a tossed egg. Juzo chortled a laugh, and then Walter was gone, the chair empty, only a patina of dust on the chair’s bottom. Juzo could only scoff, peering down to find his hands trembling in his lap.

  Another time he saw his parents, and even a third chair materialized for his mother. He knew they were dead, but still, he relished their visits. Whenever he got to asking them a question it would vaporize the mirage. He’d learned to stay motionless in these daytime nightmares, letting them do all the talking.

  There was no place for him in this world after the Shadow War. Wizards of the Silver Tower feared him. Most who know what he was wanted him dead. He couldn’t blame them. He was an apex predator, and prey naturally feared those higher up the food chain. Those who didn’t fear him initially, eventually did. He supposed it was the glowing hunger in his scarlet eye, the other a ragged mess of scars covered by an eye patch.

  He tried to return to Breden, to make a home there. It didn’t take long for news to spread about what he’d become and his dark predilections. He was a monster. There were a few survivors from the Shipton massacre, born of his turning the majority of the village into Blood Eaters. Walter and Grimbald were forced to slaughter the lot of them. Juzo had even forced Walter’s hand, sending him to the Shadow Realm.

  He didn’t want to kill anyone to sate his hunger, so he removed himself from civilized societies. Not that he’d have much of a choice, but the rationalization halted the constant beckoning of slit wrists. He made the semblance of a home for himself in the wilds south of the Great Retreat and west of the Blanched Falls. It was a place where deer, wolves, bears, and pesky squirrels reigned. Walter would’ve been astonished at his pathetic attempt at carpentry. The cuts were sloppy, timbers full of knots, walls warped, roofline sagging and wet with black rot. He didn’t know what he was going to do when it invariably caved in. He didn’t have it in him to rebuild.

  Strewn about the floor were pots and mugs for collecting water from the roof’s leaks. There was something that looked like a door, always banging off the frame when the wind blew. He slept on a mattress of straw laid against one of the walls. Behind him, leaning in the corner, was his prized possession, a Milvorian bastard sword, forged from the only alloy capable of withstanding the onslaught of Dragon fire. Nyset had given it to him a week or so after Walter’s funeral as a parting gift. They both knew there was no place for him in the Tower. He was an unmitigated risk.

  When he laid down to rest, he listened to the pleasant din of the falls through his solitary window, lulling him to sleep. He liked that. His dreams, however, held only terror. Sleep always brought him back to his time in the Shadow Realm after Walter killed him.

  He hadn’t told anyone how long he was there. He didn’t want their empty sympathy. It felt like he’d spent a decade running along a road of skulls, always running, drinking from the endless pools of blood. His body didn’t age, but his mind did. Too long.

  He couldn’t bring himself to let them have him. Why, he couldn’t say. Sleep brought it all rushing back. He was hounded by bouncing demons with mouths like doorways and giant centipedes with clacking claws. Beasts with hundreds of blinking eyes and as tall as spires all charging after him in a ceaseless hunt. He slashed their great bodies with his blade, chopped countless limbs, and on they chased. His only relief came when the sun finally struck his eye.

  Juzo’s muscles were reduced to lithe strips, cheeks sunken hollows, eyes cavernous. He stared and stared at the bottom of his wine glass, searching for purpose and meaning and finding none. He felt like a directionless arrow, loosed and forever drifting in flight. He raked his fingers through his long gray hair, pulling the length of it to rest on one shoulder.

  The time for fasting had come to an end.

  He smashed his palms against the table, rattling the bottles. The tower of corks tumbled as he jolted to his feet. He turned to face his second most valuable possession, a hogtied hunter he chanced upon during a hunt of his own today. A whimper escaped through the gagged man’s mouth, his limbs flexing as they tested his bonds. The hunter wore heavy beige pants and a dark navy shirt. His head had been shaved and forehead painted in a thick red bar. The
color indicated his home was in the Great Tree, the stronghold of the Great Retreat. Its significance was lost to Juzo, but at least he knew from where he hailed. For far too long he drank from the local fauna, but nothing sated him like the blood of men.

  “See you’ve still got some fight in you,” Juzo croaked, frowning at the bruises over the man’s round face. There was a lightness to his legs, a feeling of unsteadiness. By the Dragon, what am I doing?

  The hunter screamed, tears streaming down his blindfold, voice muffled.

  “It’s no use. There’s no one out here… none but us,” Juzo said softly. He nudged him with his boot, rolling him from his back to his side, so he faced the wall. He lowered himself to his knees and used them to block the man’s back to prevent him from moving. He licked his lips, palms bristling with sweat. “It’s been so long, so hungry,” he muttered, drawn to the body like a fly to a corpse.

  Juzo’s mouth parted, teeth sharpened to triangular points pressing lightly against the man’s throbbing neck. He lapped his tongue across his skin, tasting his sweat, heavy with the garlic stink of fear. He could hear the man’s heart beating like a raging horse. The hunter pleaded behind his gag, even his begging coming out in the annoying drawling accent of those who live in the Great Retreat. “Shut up,” Juzo hissed against his throat.

  With one swift movement, he clamped his jaw down hard, sawing his teeth back and forth like a sheep’s. The hunter shrieked and writhed, folds of flesh tearing and snapping in Juzo’s mouth. Hot blood squirted on his tongue. He closed his eyes, moaning in ecstasy at the sweetness of it. His tongue whirled on that heavy tang of iron. He noted other flavors too, a hint of earth and maybe nutmeg. He could tell what a person ate by the taste of their blood, what crop they farmed if they were farmers. The hunter’s legs flopped against the wall, and Juzo sucked and sucked with every contraction of the man’s heart.

  He remembered then why he drank the blood of men. A hot warmth tunneled through his limbs, muscles flexing with a vigor he thought lost. Cuts and bruises from today’s hunt were mended like he’d been healed by a Phoenix wielding wizard. He felt the man’s dying rage, his desire to both throttle Juzo and to flee in terror. All of his rage faded as he drank, each throb of the man’s heart growing ever weaker.

  Sounds he hadn’t heard before touched his ears. He heard the squabbling of a pair of squirrels at a treetop. The twilight breeze rustled through the trees. The fly finally found the window, tracking its distant buzzing. A twig snapped like a gong.

  “You dumb shit, if you make any more noise… if he’s here, he’s going to hear you!” a deep voice hissed.

  Juzo jerked his head up and craned his head, nose to throat dripping with a mask of blood.

  “Fuck off, was an accident,” a wheedling high-pitched voice replied.

  “Accidents get you killed,” a harsh third voice barked.

  “There’s nothing out here. A waste of time. Master’s map was wrong,” the high-pitched voice said.

  Juzo slinked to the back of his cottage, carefully avoiding the boards that he knew would produce a creak. He snuffed his candle out with thumb and finger, the other hand grabbing his sword from the corner. He inched it out of the scabbard, whispering murder, gently setting the scabbard across a chair. His heart roared in his chest, new blood throbbing in his forearms.

  They never learned. Mercenaries, bold farmers, and hunters all met the same end when they searched for him.

  “Look! A shack. Lord Terar is never wrong,” the high pitched man let out a manic giggle.

  Juzo’s blood turned to ice. A shiver coursed down his body from neck to balls, skin puckering with goosebumps. Terar. He said Terar. But I killed him. How? A sudden urge to vomit took him, but Juzo quickly mastered it, swiveling his gaze to steal a glance at the dead Treefolk hunter, a red disc forming around his head. He slid up to the edge of the door, waiting, listening. Despite the cloud of dread in his guts, a thrill of excitement surged in his limbs. Finally, there was something to alleviate the long stretch of boredom.

  “Get armed,” the deep voice whispered. “Remember your training.”

  There was the harsh rasp of freeing blades and the whisper of metal against leather loops. Every sound was distinct and with its own personality, growing in sharpness as the hunter’s blood sang in Juzo’s veins.

  Juzo ripped the door open, temporarily blinded by the bright of the pinking sky. Three dark figures stood in a semicircle before his door, jaws falling open and eyes blinking. They were armored in a mix of heavy plate, leather, and mail in a strange configuration he’d never seen before. Some bits were smooth and polished like they once belonged to soldiers of the Midgaard Falcon while others were harsh and jagged like Death Spawn armor.

  Who they were and why they were there were questions he could ask a survivor, if he managed to leave one.

  Juzo lunged for the man standing at the left, his cheeks round and chin dimpled. He raised a spiked mace in a grand swing as Juzo drove his sword through his gut, thudding against leather and stopping at the crosspiece. The Milvorian blade emerged from the man’s back, slicked with blood, the impaled man howling as he dropped his mace.

  Something glimmered on his right, leaning back and releasing his sword. A blade clashed against the impaled man’s armored leg, point hissing into the dirt. Juzo drove a fierce kick into the wrist recovering the sword, producing a crunch of ruined bones. Juzo spun, re-gripping his sword and dragging it free from the impaled man’s guts by cutting sideways to disembowel him. The disemboweled man fell to his knees with a shriek, hands fumbling at coiling intestines.

  A bolt of thunder roared in Juzo’s skull, and his world went dark, the ground coming up to punch his head. The third man. By degrees, the world returned with a shrill ringing, blood throbbing in his every pore as it worked to mend his wounds. Juzo scrambled onto his back, warmth streaming down his face and burning in his eye. He squeezed the hand that had once held his sword to find it empty. It was trapped under someone’s boot.

  The two remaining men advanced, no hesitation, no quarter. Both were lean faced and angrily scowling, their principal differences a foot in height. Juzo rolled as the sword bearer chopped down with a one-handed grip, the other injured wrist stuffed into his belt, a growl raging in his chest. He continued rolling, correctly predicting as the second man’s mace came after it, thudding into the earth and throwing pebbles across his shirt.

  “Get him!” the sword wielder shouted.

  “Shut it,” the other barked, deep voiced.

  Juzo stabbed his leg up and whirled it in a circle, using the momentum to launch himself to his feet, driving forward and tackling the sword wielder. He was fast, but Juzo was faster, twisting at the last instant to avoid impaling himself on his blade, hands finding grips on the man’s armor.

  “Death Spawn!” the sword wielder screamed. “Death—”

  Juzo cut him off as he bashed his forehead into the swordsman’s nose with a resounding pop, blood exploding from his face. The man squawked, eyes screwing shut, and Juzo hurled his body around to use it as a shield, fingers straining to maintain his grip on the man’s armor.

  The mace wielder’s blow connected with the back of his compatriot’s skull with a vicious pop. Juzo bellowed with manic laughter at his quick victory. The mace wielder struggled to extract his weapon, the spikes lodged deep into the swordsman’s head. He finally pulled it free, taking a hunk of bone and squelching hair with it, staggering back in horror as he stared at the prize captured on his weapon.

  The mace wielder dropped his mace, arms innocently raising, armor creaking. “I’m sorry. I didn’t want to be here! He made us do it, made us find you!” The man tugged at a chain around his neck securing a pendant of clear crystal. His eyes were wild, searching for an escape. An Equalizer, Juzo guessed.

  “You thought I was a wizard.” Juzo tilted his head, wiping warm blood on his pants. “Where did you find that?”

  “Wiz— what this?” the man stammered, tug
ging on the Equalizer.

  “Give it to me,” Juzo beckoned.

  The man carefully slid it off his head and tossed it to Juzo, who caught and placed it in his pocket.

  “Now, you’ll let me go?” The man grimaced, teeth dark with rot.

  Juzo crossed his arms and let out a good-natured laugh. “Maybe. Answer my questions first,” he said, raising his chin.

  “Anything, sir, anything,” the harsh-voiced man said, steepling his hands, eyes going to the dropped mace at his side.

  “Have you rediscovered your confidence? Who sent you?” Juzo stepped toward him and kicked his mace away, sending it spinning into a shrub.

  “I—” He stopped himself, cheeks twitching.

  “Who!” Juzo screamed, dashing in, and placing one leg behind the man’s lead leg. Juzo’s opposite arm scooped under his armpit, twisting him off balance and slamming him to the ground. Somewhere, an owl hooted, watching the spectacle.

  “The master!” The man gasped, choking for a breath. “The master sent us.”

  “Don’t.” Juzo laughed, pushing his fingers through his hair and pinking it in blood. “Don’t lie to me. I heard you. Say his name.”

  “Terar. The glorious master and lord of the northern realms, master of all who—” Juzo raised his boot, stomping on the man’s belly. “Terar!” the man shouted, turning on his side to vomit. “Terar, his name is Terar.”

  “Liar!” Juzo screamed. “He’s dead! Dead. I watched him die. You’re lying.”

  The man started to laugh with a madness that matched Juzo’s own, bile bubbling from his bloody lips. “He’s very much alive, Death Spawn scum.”

  “No, no,” Juzo whispered, eyebrows drawing together, lips tugging into a frown. He squatted down, gripping the man’s heavy lapels, and drawing his upper back off the ground. He looked into his face and saw he was old, maybe fifty nameyears with a salt and pepper beard that had likely grown during his travels. His eyes were a washed out blue, glistening with the start of cataracts.