by Deck Davis
“I’ll find the golemite summoner instead,” said Jakub. “No point us killing golems if they keep coming back.”
“Good thinking. Summoners are cowards, so he’ll be out of sight. Near enough to see us, far enough away that he doesn’t feel like pissing himself with fear when he sees a sword.”
Jakub thought about the obvious hypocrisy here; the fact that Mason himself had just summoned two demons, making him a summoner, too.
In the split second that he decided that voicing this thought would be ill-advised, something collided into Mason’s sword and made a ringing sound that buzzed in Jakub’s ears.
He saw a bolt by his feet. “I’ll kill that bastard sniper too,” he said.
Mason nodded. “Watch your arse. If I go back with two dead novices, it’ll come out of my pay.”
Mason roared a battle cry and then tore toward the golems, his hair flapping in the wind, his sword aloft. If Jakub hadn’t have just seen him raise two demons from the Blacktyde, he’d have sworn that the lunatic instructor was a barbarian, not a warlock.
When Mason reached the first golem, he swung his sword as though he was wielding a club; both hands on the hilt, depending on strength to cleave through the golem’s mud body in a spray of dirt. He definitely didn’t rely on finesse.
While Mason dealt with the golems and his demon stood watch over Bendie, Jakub started toward the hill north east of them. Shaped like an arm, it rose fifteen feet into the air, and there was a mound at the peak that offered cover. That must have been where the summoner and maybe even the sniper were hiding.
Jakub rushed to it. A bolt whizzed by his face, so close he couldn’t help but drop to the ground on instinct.
He’s reloading. Get up, he told himself.
He forced himself up and then ran. His calves ached as he sprinted up the hill but he reached the top of it, only to find it empty.
And then a bolt ripped into his thigh.
Pain tore through his leg. He lost his balance and fell, rolling down the hill, banging his head on a rock at the bottom.
He coughed out a mouthful of dirt. “Shit,” he said, and the word sounded dull in his ears, as though he hadn’t really said it.
The sounds around him dimmed now. He heard a ringing in his ears, and cold seeped over him.
He clenched his fist and pushed himself up to his knees, then wiped mud from his lips.
The longer he stayed still, the more chance he’d get hit again. He needed to move, now. He needed to cut the sniper open before another bolt ripped through him.
Where else can he be hiding?
The bolt had hit his left leg when he’d reached the hill summit, so it must have come from the west.
He knew where the bastard was, but now came the hard part; he was injured and in the open, and he needed to move with a wounded leg.
If only he had a soul necklace, he could have used Health Harvest to heal himself. As it was, he had no essence to use in his spells, no potions to give him a quick fix.
Behind him, he heard Mason’s roars mix with thuds as he swung his sword into one golem after another.
“They’re getting back up!” he heard him shout. “The summoner, novice. Take him out!”
He had to be quick. He needed to fight through the pain.
He checked his leg; the bolt shaft had snapped in half on impact, so the head and a splinter of it was wedged in him.
No sense pulling it out now; it’d make him bleed more and if he lost enough blood, he’d faint.
Find the sniper, find the summoner. It was the only way to finish this.
With a struggle, he got to his feet. His thigh felt numb now, and he knew that was shock setting in; first step numbness, next up would be weakness, nausea, vomiting.
He had to get to them before that happened.
“Over by the bushes!” shouted Mason.
Jakub saw them now; the golemite summoner was a gwarflock; a goblin-like creature whose furry body was covered by a green robe. He wore a hood over his head, but his pointed ears stuck out. He carried a wooden staff in his hand, and the staff was no doubt serving as a focal point for him to channel his mana into.
The sniper, lying beside the summoner and squinting through his crossbow sights, was a man. He was rotund and dressed head to toe in battle leathers, and had a quiver of bolts beside him.
A gwarflock and a man. That was something he could deal with, if only he didn’t need to cross thirty feet of ground while avoiding the sniper’s bolts to get to them.
His thigh wound meant he’d be too slow to sprint, so the sniper would nail him as soon as he rushed toward them. Since they’d already seen him, sneaking up on them was out.
He needed something to give him cover, but what?
CHAPTER 12
He couldn’t use necromancy, and he didn’t have a crossbow of his own. He had to either reach them before the sniper could fire a bolt, or kill them from afar.
Knowing what was in his inventory bag off by heart, he knew there was little he could use.
Well, he had to try something.
He took an iron sword from his bag. Lightweight, blunt, and cheap, it wouldn’t be much good in hand to hand combat, but that wasn’t what he had planned.
He held it by the hilt, kept the sniper in his vision, and then threw the sword.
It spun through the air, rotating again and again…before landing ten feet away from the sniper and the summoner.
Damn it.
Maybe Mason would have had enough strength to make that work, but not Jakub.
The sniper raised his crossbow an inch, ready to fire.
“Shit!”
Jakub dropped to the ground. It made him a harder target, but still a target.
And then one figure ran through the middle of the battleground, followed by as second giving chase.
“Get down, you fucking idiot,” shouted Mason.
The first figure was Bendie, awake and back on his feet and panicking in a way that was too shameful for a warlock, even a novice. He wasn’t looking where he was going, instead just sprinting in the first direction he’d seen, desperate to escape the battlefield.
“Come back, young novice!” shouted the portly demon as it chased him, its horns flopping as it ran.
The sniper let a bolt loose. It caught Bendie on his ankle, ripping through skin. The novice crashed and hit the ground, his nose crunching on contact with the soil.
Nearby, Mason pivoted his whole body, cleaving a mud golem in two, sending shards of dirt and rock flying around.
Jakub struggled to his feet. His pulse hammered as shock worked through him. Though his thigh was numb, the wound was triggering his body’s response, and he felt a dull sickness in his stomach.
Not long now before he’d be useless. A body’s response to a wound was shock; to make the wounded person useless. Some defence.
It was now or never.
With the sniper reloading and the summoner focused on raising one of his dead golems, Jakub ran toward them, holding the sickness back, willing the cold and the shock to leave him.
He covered the ground as the sniper clicked the bolt into place. The man looked up.
“Oh, shit,” he said, raising his hands.
Jakub swung his sword. The blade carved into his head, meeting resistance on his skull, chipping bone and making blood spurt.
He tried to wrench it free but it was stuck fast in the man’s head. It didn’t matter; the man was dead now, his eyes blank, his fingers losing their grip on his crossbow.
The summoner pointed his staff at Jakub.
Jakub left his sword stuck in the sniper’s head and instead grabbed the man’s crossbow, levelled it at the summoner, and pulled the trigger.
It was a poor shot.
He’d aimed for the summoner’s neck, but he was unpracticed with the weapon, and even at close range he missed his target by two feet.
But while he’d missed the summoner’s neck, the bolt had found home in his gut.<
br />
The gwarflock fell onto his back, groaning.
Jakub stumbled over to him, and then crashed down onto the gwarflock chest knee-first, making the gwarflock wheeze out all his breath.
With no weapon to draw, Jakub put his hands around the gwarflock’s neck and squeezed, tensing his muscles to fight through the summoner’s struggles, putting all his energy into closing his windpipe, suffering desperate scratches and punches until the gwarflock was limp.
CHAPTER 13
The clearing was quiet now, with only Bendie’s groans breaking the silence. Despite the numbness in his thigh disappearing and the pain throttling back, Jakub was determined not to join Bendie in his screaming.
On top of that, his hands felt strange now, as if he could still feel the gwarflock’s flesh in his grip. He could still hear its desperate chokes in his mind, only they sounded more pathetic now.
Mason wouldn’t have felt bad about it. Or, he wouldn’t have admitted to it, anyway, but Jakub wasn’t worried about confessing the truth in his own mind – killing felt wrong. No matter what it was, the human soul was designed to feel heavy when you took a life.
Right now, there were other things to worry about.
The splintered bolt was stuck in his thigh just above his knee. There was blood smeared around it, and dribbles of it had stained his trousers. He needed to pull it out, but he needed something to stop the blood when he did.
Mason passed him a vial. “Try and save some of it,” he said. “The academy is stingy with its potions. The alchemists act like its gold dust.”
Jakub popped the cork, smelling the fruity pinch of restoration potion. He gripped the bolt near the shaft, but the smallest movement sent tremors of agony through him.
Knowing Mason was watching him, knowing that if he could just hold in the pain then he would look tougher than Bendie, Jakub breathed deeply.
“Here, let me,” said Mason.
“I’ve got it.”
Jakub knew the basic of field dressing and how to deal with combat wounds; it was a class that everyone in the academy had to take. He’d even put it into practice in his first assignment, when a creature with giant claws had sliced his right thigh, leaving him with a scar.
He gripped his sword and bit the hilt, and then wrenched the bolt free. Pain exploded in him, coursing from his thigh and buzzing in his skull. It was a wave of it at first, but the wave subsided with each throb until it reached its plateau.
He dabbed restoration potion on the wound, then watched it close until it was half the size.
Knowing the limits of restoration potion, he corked the vial and passed it back to Mason. He’d have to let the rest of the wound heal naturally, but at least the bleeding had stopped.
“Thanks,” he said.
“Can you walk? Need me to take you back to the academy?”
“Yeah, they’d love that wouldn’t they? I’m good, thanks.”
He got to his feet, limped a few steps, and then the pain lessened as the restoration potion numbed his skin.
“I’m a man of my word,” said Mason. “Whatever loot you find, it’s yours. I’ll check on my little warlock friends here.”
“You don’t seem too upset that one of them died.”
“The beauty of working for an academy with a necromancy department is that death is rarely the end.”
“They might have used up all the academy’s soul essence supplies bringing Abbie back.”
“I didn’t think of that. Irvine’s gonna take that out of my pay.”
“You really don’t give a shit, do you?”
“A man’s got to look out for himself. This is a job, nothing more. You’ll have to learn that yourself, now you’re out of the academy.”
“What about Abbie? What happened to her, Mason? Nobody will tell me anything.”
“How about you tell me why you’re so interested. I’m older than you, and I’ve seen a lot of the world. I know what concern for just a friend looks like, and this isn’t it.”
“We used to go out,” said Jakub.
“That wasn’t so hard, was it? But I told you; I’ve been ordered not to talk about it.”
“Got it. More bureaucratic bullshit. Look, I helped you, and I’m worried about her. Just tell me something.”
“Fine, novice, but only because you weren’t completely useless back there. I’ve been ordered not to saying anything, so I’m not telling you that while we were on assignment, a bunch of crazy bastards in robes ambushed us. One was a mage, and he trapped us in a wall of flames. They tried taking Abbie; not killing her, but taking her. A big fella had her on the back of his horse before I ran through the flames and tried slicing the bastard’s back in two.”
“What happened to Abbie?”
“There were three of em, like I said. The mage fella, he cast a spell at me, but hit Abbie instead. Some kind of acid; it burned through the poor girl’s neck.”
Jakub felt sick. That was why nobody was allowed to see her after her resurrection; the spell had scarred her.
Pity welled up in him, thick and bilious in his stomach.
Mason put his hand on his shoulder. “She’s alive, novice. She’s in the land of the living, and there’s worse places to be than here, trust me. You know where warlocks go in the afterlife.”
“Blacktyde.”
He nodded. “The sacrifice every warlock makes; giving up our afterlife so we can summon demons from the Blacktyde. No wonder they say we’re a set of crazy bastards.”
Jakub had spoken about this with Abbie a hundred times when they were together. Normally when people died, they went to the Greylands until their resurrection window closed. After that, they could go to one of seven afterlives, some nice, some nasty.
None were worse than Blacktyde.
In order to get the power to summon demons from the Blacktyde, novice warlocks made a pact for their soul, promising it to the Blacktyde when their time among the living was up. They called it the Grand Sacrifice, and this sacrifice was the reason that warlocks were such a favorite subject for bards to sing romantic ballads about.
Jakub had told her again and again what a batshit crazy idea it was.
“It’s what I’ve wanted to be all my life,” Abbie would say. “It’s my soul, mine to do what I want with. Worry about your own.”
So maybe Mason was right; Abbie was alive, so the Blacktydes wouldn’t have her yet. Even so, she was so beautiful. To know that she’d been disfigured…
No, he told himself. She won’t be any less beautiful because of some bastard mage. And if I ever find him, I’ll tear out his heart.
“We better be going,” said Mason. “I need to get Novice Norris back to the academy and get the necros to bring him back. Take what you want from the bodies.”
“Got it.”
“And listen, novice. They might have banished you from the academy, but that doesn’t mean a damned thing. I was expelled too, once. So, I went away, and I took the warlock skills they’d given me and I got strong enough that one day, they were begging me to come back. They can kick you out of their building, but they can’t take anything else away. Got it?”
“Thanks, Mason. Listen, can you tell Abbie that as soon as she’s ready, I want to see her?”
“Got it. What’s your full name? She’s going to want to know.”
“Jakub Russo.”
“Russo? You’re the kid who Kortho saved from the Imbibists.”
“That’s right,” said Jakub.
“Gods, you haven’t had it easy, have you? Take care then, Jakub.” Mason walked away from Jakub and toward Bendie, who was groaning louder than Jakub even thought it possible to do without dying. “Ah, shut up. You’ll be fine, you big baby. Get up.”
When Mason and Bendie rode away with Norris’s corpse, Jakub was alone in the shrubbery with the brigands, golem, summoner and sniper corpses around him.
It was getting dark, so he needed to loot quickly and then get moving.
He went from bod
y to body, checking pockets, sheaths, bags, and any other crevice or compartment that might hold something valuable.
When he’d collected everything, he pressed his thumb tattoo and let it categorize his loot for him.
*Loot Received!*
Wheel of cheese x5
*Common*
Value: 1 Gold
Alchemical Fire Lythes
*Common*
Once activated by twisting them, alchemical fire lythes will explode on contact with air.
Blood Draught: Rogue
**Uncommon**
A vial of blood taken from a rogue and retreated with a mana solution to give the drinker temporary low-level rogue skills
Bendeldrick’s Glyphline Grimoire Book
***Rare***
Named the most blood-drenched tome in history, Bendeldrick’s book about those with magic glyphline tattoos and his feeling that everyone should be entitled to one, caused more riots and inner-city damage than any other political book published.
Dragon Ring
**Uncommon**
A ring that bestows a thin layer of dragon-scales over the wearer’s chest, giving them improved defence. Effect can be used for 5 minutes, once every 5 days.
2 Gold
9 Silver
21 Bronze
Jakub put his new loot in his bag, mentally deciding the fate of each item in turn. He’d keep the vial of rogue blood and the dragon ring, since sneak and lock picking skills and dragon scale armor would always be useful.
As for the rare book and the cheese; he’d sell four wheels of cheese and keep one for himself as a treat. He was a little wary of the alchemical fire lythes, though. He’d heard about how dangerous they were, and how they’d been banned from production by a royal decree.
Still, as long as he didn’t activate them and expose them to air, they wouldn’t blow. Maybe he could sell them to a black-market trader, or perhaps he’d find a use for them.
He’d find a rare book dealer for the Grimoire tome.
He didn’t want anything to do with it; he’d heard of Bendeldrick’s Glyphline Grimoire book before and had been advised never to read it.
